Preview: Client Portal Upgrade

When we set out to improve our Client Portal in Q3, we weren’t content with just giving the portal a fresh coat of paint. First and foremost, we wanted to give your clients a reason to use the portal - not just to snoop, but to actually collaborate and work together. 

To this end, we had a few specific features we wanted to introduce.

More detail with more control

One of the chief complaints of the current client portal is that it doesn’t provide clients with a whole lot of detail. Of course, there’s a reason for this - while you might want to share real-time budget progress on a project with some clients, you might want to keep things more high-level with others.

The first big improvement with the new client portal is dramatically enhanced details that you can share with external users - not just clients, but also partners and other contributors - with strong, granular controls.

Some of the examples we’ve been working toward include:

• Allowing certain clients to see real time usage on certain contracts & retainers.
• Allowing certain clients to see real time budget utilization and progress on certain projects.
• Allowing certain clients to see current tasks on certain projects, issues, retainers and even sales (and their status).
• Allowing certain clients (or more commonly, collaborators like sales/channel partners) to see status, progress and even value on sales opportunities in your pipeline.

We realized as well in the planning of this module that we didn’t want to make the Client Portal a massive management burden for you and your team, so we built out permissions model to support a range of “defaults” which you can set. This will allow you to open or close access to specific clients, specific groups of users at a client, or even on specific sales, projects, issues or contracts. Our mantra has been control without overhead.

While we’ll have a lot more detail to share about this in a week or so, the curious may want to know the model we’re using (in reverse order of application):

Global Permissions. These define how clients (or contributors) can interact generally with objects in the Accelo Client Portal. Can they see all of the activities against their client account, or just ones that include them in the conversation? Can they view, and optionally, create tasks? Can they invite other users in their organization? Can they upload files/attachments?

Module Permissions. These define how clients (or contributors) can interact with a specific module. Want to lock them out of the sales module? Sure, no problem. Want to give clients default access to see a certain field or feature in the projects module? No worries at all.

Client Permissions. This is where you can start to override permissions for a specific client or even a group of contacts at a client. In addition to overriding the global (and module) permissions for a specific client, you can create groups (such as departments or managers) which may have more or less permissions than the default or other contacts at the client.

Object Permissions. If you have a specific sale, project, issue or retainer that you want to provide enhanced (or restricted) client access to, the good news is that you can control them here. So, if by default you don’t want to let clients see a project budget, but for this one particular project you’re working on a T&M basis and want to share real-time budget usage, you’ll be able to do it here.

By sharing more (and selectively) with your clients, the new Client Portal will allow you to give your clients much more value, transparency and collaboration than you’ve been able to deliver in the past. And of course, all of it comes out of the box for free.

Client-created tasks & attachments

In the same way we’ve been working to boost interaction by providing more details to your clients when they log in (above), we’ve also made it easier to collaborate via the portal with clients now able to create tasks and attachments against their projects, issues, retainers and even sales.

When a client creates a task, we let the manager of the object (sale, project, issue, etc) know via email, but we don’t assign it to a user (so you can still stay in control of your teams workload). When tasks created by clients have their status change, we will let the client know in real time via email - boosting collaboration and transparency.

When a client creates an attachment, we’ll automatically store/capture it against the object (sale, project, issue, etc) and let the manager of that object know a new file has been uploaded. This will be perfect for situations where your clients need to upload revisions or large documents that are a pain to email - now they can just use Accelo.

Sign-offs and approvals

One completely new feature (as opposed to an improvement or opening up of collaboration) is our new Signoffs Module. This module makes it easy for any business that needs client feedback and approval as part of their business process to get it - quickly, easily and 100% online.

Instead of having to cobble together your own email attachments, the signoffs module will make it easy to select (or upload) any files or attachments you want to ask your clients to approve or provide their signoff on. You’ll be able to choose which client contacts you want to get signoff from, as well as any comments/instructions.

When you send through the signoff your clients will individually get an email invitation containing a special time-limited link which will log them straight into the Client Portal - no need for them to remember a pesky username or password.

Once there, they’ll be able to easily see the attachments, make comments on them and either accept or reject your signoff request. Any comments they make will be visible against the signoff in Accelo, so you and your team can get feedback from the client in a quick, easy and collaborative fashion.

Finally, using Accelo’s automatic email capture functionality, you can engage other client contacts in the conversation on a signoff request even if they don’t log in - this way, other client contacts can be encouraged to be involved in the conversation and not get left behind!

While the benefits for our many visual professionals (designers, marketers, architects, etc) are obvious, we also think this module will be popular with anyone who needs client input or approval on documents or even just notes.

Easier invitations - for you & them

Of course, all this Client Portal stuff is great, but first you’ve got to get people into the Portal. We’ve made this easier too by revamping our invitation system.

Firstly, the screen you and your team will use to invite people to use the Portal - sending them an email with a special invitation link - has been upgraded. Now you can also reset passwords, revoke access and even impersonate that contact to see what they see!

Additionally, we’ve introduced - for the first time - the ability for your clients to invite their colleagues to use your client portal. They can invite their colleagues by entering their email address, and we’ll automatically invite them in and when they accept we’ll create a new contact under their client account in your Accelo. Yep, this means they’re spreading the word about how awesome your business is and doing sales data entry for you!

Finally, we’re also introducing an autoreply feature which will allow people who email you to get an invitation to collaborate via the client portal (if they haven’t already logged in and set their username/password). This way, when your clients email you you can automatically invite them to log into your portal, making it even easier to collaborate (and saving you the effort of going through and inviting everyone one-at-a-time.

...and the new coat of (your) paint

Of course, we couldn’t let the Client Portal upgrade go ahead without that new coat of paint, and this time, we’ve made sure you can have your own coat of paint. The new version of the Client Portal allows you to upload your own logo, your own header image, and to have *much* more control over the look and feel of your client portal with unlimited color selections so you can make sure your client portal matches your brand.

Timing

Our team has finished building all of the back-end aspects to the new client portal and most of the client-facing front-end pieces too. Keep an eye on your inbox late next week for an invitation to join a special sneak peek session where we’ll walk you through all of these improvements and share details around launch timing and availability.