Technology
Most firms cannot say what proportion of clients logged into their portal last quarter. Establish that before spending anything on improving it.
Ask a firm what proportion of clients logged into their portal in the last quarter. Most do not know. The ones who check are usually surprised, and rarely upward.
This is worth establishing before spending anything on improving it.
Not because the software is bad. Because most clients have no recurring reason to visit. They are not trading, not checking daily, and they hear from you when something needs attention. A portal answers a question they are not asking.
The clients who do use them are typically the ones who wanted more detail than they were getting, which is worth noticing on its own.
Documents. Secure delivery and a permanent place for statements, agreements, and tax material is genuinely useful and is the main reason most portals justify themselves.
The uploads that arrive by email otherwise. Every firm has clients emailing unprotected documents. A portal is the alternative you can actually point them to.
A place to send someone. "It is in your portal" resolves a category of request permanently.
Making clients feel looked after. That comes from being contacted by a person, and no interface has ever substituted for it. Firms that lean on a portal to carry the relationship find out at the wrong moment.
Give people a reason to be there. Put something they need behind it — the tax documents, the meeting materials, the report that arrives quarterly — and tell them at the meeting rather than in an email they will not open.
Log them in yourself, once, in front of you. Adoption is overwhelmingly determined by whether someone got past the first login with help.
Buy a portal for secure document handling, which it does well and which you need. Do not buy one expecting it to deepen relationships, and do not measure it as though that were the job.
Reporting people actually open →
Questions this did not answer? Ask them directly — that is what the twenty minutes is for.
Schedule a call to see for yourself