Customer Portal for Project Tracking

The advantage of having a customer portal is that it is always available – 24/7, 365 days a year – thereby helping both the development team and customer access and update information quickly and efficiently, so improving communication. This makes the portal an essential way for many customers to interact with the development company once the project is underway.

The customer portal enhances the customer experience in several ways. Customers can quickly get answers to their questions, as well as access to the development status of their software. By including customer feedback at every step of the software development, it allows them to take ownership of the work being done by putting them in control of how it progresses.

One of the advantages is that customers can contact a business out-of-hours when it best suits them. It means that a company doesn’t have to find additional resources to extend working hours or increase employee numbers to provide a good level of technical support. It also helps to maintain a positive customer experience by ensuring customers can track the progress of their project in real time, so reducing the number of inbound support calls and enquiries.

Common customer portal benefits include:

• Improved visibility and access to real-time information 24/7, 365 days a year
• Streamlining development and management time
• Improved customer experience and retention levels
• Enhanced visibility of project performance
• Reduced internal email traffic to source information
• Improved internal and customer communication
• More efficient bug reporting

Additionally, a proven online customer portal should provide your organisation with flexible levels of authentication and security. This will help to define how customers access the information and how they are recognised.

As well as enhancing the customer’s experience, a collaborative customer project tracking system, such as Blueberry’s PTS Customer Portal, also presents a number of other opportunities for software companies to improve their own development processes – being able to work with multiple clients at once and secure 24/7 online project tracking being the two most important.

Let’s take a closer look at how Blueberry’s PTS Customer Portal makes life easier for the company and its clients:

Collaboration

• Blueberry’s PTS Customer Portal ensures we include the customer at every step of the software development and allows customer to take ownership of the work being done by putting them in control of progress.
• Blueberry can share a project’s progress with the customer as well as any specific issues or tasks.
• The customer can view comments on the project and contribute to the conversation if they wish.
• As a customer, they can create their own issues in the Portal and then track our progress to fix them.
• In addition, they can upload images, documents and videos to tasks and issues to clarify their message and make bug reporting more efficient.

Project Tracking 

• The Portal is the customer facing part of a very sophisticated in-house project tracking system (PTS), custom designed with experience to fit the Blueberry process that works. This helps ensure your software is built to the highest quality, with complete requirements traceability, so we deliver exactly what we say we will.

Feedback Tool 

• Our Feedback Tool allows project stakeholders to drop pins into areas of a page of a development site (or other customer environment) where they want to add feedback or pinpoint an issue. These pins then create service request tickets in the project tracking system which are also trackable in the Customer Portal. 
• Feedback items can include attachments, which can also be screenshots and video recordings created inside the Feedback Tool integrated application. 
• The Customer Portal, in combination with the Feedback Tool, not only guarantees we work in close partnership with our customers, it also confirms their understanding is always the same as ours.

Putting the Customer in Control  
 

• Blueberry can use the Portal to ask customers to approve or reject specifics relating to their project, before we begin work, so putting them in control of progress. 
• BlueSprints is our Agile approach to software development. Items included in current Sprints and progress Burndowns can be viewed by the customer, so they are fully aware of the state of progress. 
• They can view the Project Planner, an instrument shared for use used with Blueberry’s Project Managers for planning.

Plus, all customers are given access to our FlashBack screen recorder software, which is perfect for reporting bugs whilst testing.

A good online customer project tracking system can revolutionise customer relationships. It lets you connect on a more efficient level, giving your customers instant project tracking when they need it. This can revolutionise your business by improving efficiency, reducing build time, and saving money.

Sharing information electronically frees the development company and its customers from long meetings and phone calls, which enhances efficiency and timely action. It’s also more secure, faster and efficient to emailing or phone calls.

It allows for smarter collaboration with your customers and gives them convenient 24/7 access to track the progress of their project.

Blueberry’s PTS Customer Portal enables customers to track the progress of their software project, providing functionality to report issues, keep up to date with tasks and issues, and view additional delivery information, such as burndown charts. It allows project stakeholders to drop pins where they want to add feedback or pinpoint an issue, automatically creating service request tickets in the project tracking system. This allows customers to take ownership of the work being done by putting them in control of progress.