Redesign of Salesforce B2B Portal for Better Usability

Client

The end Client is an international consumer products company headquartered in the United States. Being a leader in consumer goods manufacturing, the company sells its products in over 180 countries.

Challenge

The end Client was using the Salesforce-based B2B portal for keeping in touch with retailers purchasing their goods. The portal provided the company’s clients with the info on the goods and their characteristics, upcoming releases of new products and promotional events. However, the way of organizing the info on the portal lacked user-friendliness because of poorly structured portal pages and numerous tabs containing the info about consumer products and their prices, which harmed the efficiency of end Client’s promotional activities. Since the Client’s in-house IT department lacked the knowledge of Salesforce functionality to make the needed UI improvements, the Client turned to ScienceSoft to get the Salesforce consulting expertise they needed.

Solution

Having analyzed the portal, ScienceSoft’s Salesforce administrator came to a conclusion that certain usability improvements can be achieved with configuring standard Salesforce functionality. He reconfigured the portal’s interface creating separate user pages. He also constructed other separate pages, like Products, Trade Rules, etc., and optimized the existing tabs, so that the users could easier access the needed info on products, their detailed descriptions and prices, distributing rules that authorized dealers should follow, etc.

The administrator used HTML and CSS to further enhance the portal’s usability through:

• Adapting the portal’s pages for mobile UI.
• Developing new layouts for the knowledge articles and quizzes provided by the end Client, which the administrator regularly uploaded to the portal.
• Creating a separate web page for the event calendar with the structured info on upcoming promotional events, prize draws, etc. The calendar adapted for mobile UI helped users keep track of the upcoming events.

Results

The end Client got the enhanced usability of their B2B portal due to the better structure of the portal’s pages, optimized tabs and the event calendar. Mobile view enabled for the portal’s web pages also added to user convenience. The improvements performed by ScienceSoft’s professional enabled better promotion of the end Client’s brand and more efficient maintaining of relationships with their customers.

Technologies and Tools

CSS, HTML, Salesforce 1 mobile app.