The Top 3 “Must Haves” for Creating a Great Partner Portal

Make it easy to navigate. This first lesson is deceptively simple–after all, who wouldn’t want their portal to be easy to use? But when you need to provide access to dozens of documents and tools (for example, product comparison sheets, call scripts, marketing resources and online certifications), things can start to get a bit … complicated.
To make sure our portal would be intuitive to both first- and long-time users, our first step was to meticulously map out the entire site structure to visualize the user experience. This helped ensure that all partners can instantly understand what part of the portal to click on to access what they need, and to get there in as few clicks as possible.

Ensure it contains all necessary–and up to date–resources. With so many brands and products within the Corel portfolio, we have a lot of information that partners need access to. To ensure anyone can easily find the latest version of the document or resource they need, we created a brand-new cloud file storage system.
This file system contains all partner resources, clearly named and organized neatly into folders, and is linked to from the partner portal. This enables our team to easily add or update files without cluttering the portal interface or risk having outdated resources or broken links.

Enable self-service activities. Efficiency drives everything we do at Corel, so we knew it would be essential to give partners the ability to complete certain activities themselves within the portal (such as registering deals, viewing training materials and taking product certification exams).
By customizing the built-in functionality of our partner portal website, we’re able to give our partners self-service capabilities that save them–and us–time by enabling them to perform key tasks on their own, without having to reach out to a member of our team.