The four reasons portals go unused
- It arrived as a bare link with no explanation of why it matters.
- It arrived too early, when the portal had nothing real to show.
- It required registration, and the customer decided calling was easier.
- It was wrong once, and now the customer trusts the phone instead.
The introduction that works
Attach the link to information the customer already wants. The message confirming their start date is the highest-intent moment you will get — they are opening it anyway, and the link inherits that attention.
Say what it is for in one sentence: their dates, their status, their documents, any time, without waiting for the office to be open. That sentence is the difference between a link that gets tapped and one that gets ignored.
Keep it current or lose it permanently
Adoption is fragile in one direction. A customer who checks the portal and finds last week's status will not check again, and no later improvement wins them back. Currency is therefore an operational commitment, not a technical one — someone has to keep the record moving.
How to know it is working
- Portal opens per active job, tracked over time.
- Inbound 'what is happening' calls per job — this should fall.
- How often staff answer a question the portal already answers.
- Whether customers reference the portal in their own messages.