Community portals:
functionality, benefits, and best practices

Community portals: functionality, benefits, and best practices

Connecting people with shared interests

A community portal is an online platform for interactions between organizations and communities of people with similar personal or professional interests. Itransition builds bespoke user-friendly community portals for better communication, efficient knowledge sharing, and seamless collaboration.

of organizations agree community is critical to their mission

CMX, 2022

Key functionality of community portals

Based on the type and purpose of a community, we equip the portal with different feature combinations to meet customers’ specific needs.

Community membership
  • User registration
  • Profile creation
  • Membership programs
  • Role distribution with relevant privileges
Social engagement
  • Group discussions and forum
  • Private and public chats
  • Video chats
  • Comments
  • Social sharing
Content creation and management
  • Content templates
  • Easy search with tagging
  • Widgets for trendy topics
  • Discussion moderation tools
Knowledge transfer and training
  • Professional trainings
  • Partner certifications
  • Customer knowledge base
  • Learning management
Gamification
  • Likes and dislikes
  • Awards for active participation
  • Reputational badges
  • User ranking
Event management
  • Video streaming and recording
  • Personal user calendars
  • Event submission form
  • Calendar filter
Ad enablement
  • Ad templates
  • Banner, button and pop-up ads
  • Different ad placement options
  • Ad scheduling
Self-service
  • Ticketing system
  • Search widget
  • Automated chatbots
  • Interactive library of self-help materials

We deliver community portals for any audience

Itransition creates robust portals that meet the specific needs of online communities based on their size, demographics, or common interests.

For customers

For customers

For customers

We build customer portals as a powerful self-service tool and a reliable source of knowledge, helping you grow a dedicated community around your brand. Customers can find information on various topics, manage orders and payments, submit claims, and communicate with the brand team and other users.

Case study
Core app

intuitive, attractive, and speedy

Internet portal for a large bank

Itransition created a banking portal for Rietumu Banka to align their digital strategy to their clients’ expectations.

For employees

For employees

For employees

We develop employee portals for effective professional communication and networking with diverse tools for professional growth. Users can discuss different topics in chats, discussion boards, and forums, search for information in the knowledge base, receive newsletters, hold online conferences, and take career training courses.

Case study
Several hundred

everyday users

Itransition created a portal for centralized document and project management and enterprise-wide collaboration.

For partners

For partners

For partners

With a partner portal in place, businesses can establish new contacts with vendors, dealers, and partners, attract more new customers, and, ultimately, increase sales. We equip our portals with features for self-service, partner onboarding, and data analysis, creating a valuable collaboration space for businesses.

Case study
Instant access

to 10 GB of documents

Itransition performed maintenance and support of the Xerox partner portal. The impeccable portal operation together with seamless UX streamlined workflows and improved productivity.

For people with shared interests

Case study
100,000+

registered users

Wellness community platform

Itransition built a SaaS platform for wellness enthusiasts with multiple messaging and video chat options and a media library with self-help and educational materials.

Our community portal development services

Itransition provides a full range of community portal development services to deliver the best solution for your business needs.

Our community portal development services
Our team can carry out an in-depth analysis of your community portal requirements, business processes, and end users’ needs to map out the future solution. We can also help you choose the software delivery model and decide on additional features to add.
  • Custom community portals

    Itransition creates community solutions from scratch, covering the full cycle of software development including prototyping, UX/UI design, back-end and front-end development, system integration, end-to-end testing, and post-release support. You get a proprietary community hub consistent with your brand and community aims.

  • Platform-based community portals

    We build portals on top of best-in-class platforms, aligning the end solution with your requirements and objectives. We implement the necessary features and tweak the design to ensure the portal’s UX/UI is coherent with your brand. In the end, with lower upfront costs and shorter implementation time, you get a fully-fledged solution customized specifically for your business.

We can move your portal to a modern higher-capacity environment if your legacy solution no longer meets your needs. We offer safe portal data migration, destination platform set-up, and comprehensive testing for error-free operation.
We can revamp your community portal to improve its performance and align it with your current needs. Our team can eliminate outdated features and add new ones while preserving the solution’s core functionality. Modernization can also include the creation of an engaging user interface to fuel community involvement.

Drive community engagement with an effective portal

Turn to Itransition

Community portal integrations

Connecting your community portal to enterprise or third-party systems allows you to build a single digital ecosystem and reap more benefits from seamless data exchange.

Core integrations
CRM
ERP
PIM
Data analytics software
Ticketing system

CRM

The access to comprehensive data about community members, their behavior, preferences, and expectations stored in CRM allows companies to build a more personalized user experience.

ERP

With an ERP connected to your portal, you can provide customers with real-time inventory information and make data exchange automated and error-free.

PIM

An integration with a product information management system ensures the consistency and visibility of information across your community portal and other business systems.

Data analytics software

We can integrate data analytics tools to help you capture relevant customer data and track your portal’s performance for more personalized services, data-driven decisions, and accurate business risk mitigation.

Ticketing system

We can connect your portal to a ticketing system to help you manage user requests, combine interactions into a single thread, preserve communication context, and improve overall customer experience.

Community portal development roadmap

1

Planning

Business needs analysis

Development strategy

Step-by-step project plan with deadlines

2

Design

Portal architecture

Visual style selection

UI mapping

Prototyping with formatted content

3

Development

Front-end and back-end development

Integration with other corporate systems

Risk mitigation

4

Testing

Functional testing

Unit and integration testing

Load testing

5

Deployment

Product release

Post-release testing

Staff training

6

Maintenance and support

Performance monitoring

Bug fixes

Software updates

On-demand training

Tech stack

We employ top-notch technologies and tools to build a secure and reliable community portal that will help you establish a strong online presence and grow an engaged community.

5 layers of community portal development

1
Customer experience
Visible layer Implemented with the help of a CMS platform

WordPress, Drupal Orchard, Umbraco, Sitecore

Headless CMS (Strapi, Directus, Contentful) + Jamstack (Next.JS, Gatsby)

2
Customer communication
Social contact layer Implemented with the help of messaging and forum solution integration

Zendesk

Live chat (Drift, Intercom, etc.)

3
Customer satisfaction and behavior
Feedback and behavior analytics layer Implemented with various analytics methods

Feedback forms

Google Analytics and Social Tracking

4
Customer support
Self-service layer Implemented with the help of platform module integration or third-party solutions

Zendesk Service Now

Live chat (Drift, Intercom, etc.) CRM integration

5
Customer engagement
Selling layer Contact form or online quote, implemented with custom development, ecommerce module, or CRM integration

Magento Hybris

CRM integration

Benefits of community portals

Community portals provide a digital environment for effective interactions between community members, bringing multiple benefits to the audience and portal owners.

Enhanced community engagement

A community portal can keep community members loyal and engaged.

Audience growth

An engaging portal can stimulate customer retention and drive user growth.

Data accumulation and analytics

User data accumulated over time helps understand your audience and its needs.

Improvement ideas

Businesses can get helpful insights from user behavior and communications.

Increased brand awareness

An active portal helps the brand gain more visibility.

Lower customer support costs

Users can solve their problems without turning to support with the help of other community members.

Positive brand association

Communicating with single-minded people on a brand’s community portal, a user gets positive associations with the company.

Better communication

Community portal is equipped with a forum and messaging tools for streamlined member communication.

Reliable knowledge source

Searching through other members’ discussions, a user can find valuable insights on a topic they are interested in.

Flexible self-service

Self-service features, such as a knowledge base or FAQ section, enable community members to solve their problems easier and faster.

Community support

Portal forums offer a collaborative space for community members to connect and share experiences.

Device-agnostic experience

Most community portals are mobile-friendly, meaning users can access them from desktops, tablets, or smartphones.

How we build top-performing community portals

Itransition applies best practices for community software development to provide users with the necessary resources and ensure their seamless communication with each other.

Simple and intuitive UI

We build portals with user-friendly interfaces and intuitive navigation to facilitate seamless customer interaction with the portal and reduce search time.

User information privacy and security

We develop our portals with a focus on user data protection. Implementing multi-step authentication as well as data backup and encryption technologies, we ensure the safe collection and storage of the data your users share.

Mobile responsiveness

We develop mobile-responsive user interfaces for our community portals, re-aligning asset hierarchy, resizing images, and adapting text and other elements to fit the mobile device screen in both portrait and landscape modes.

Cyberbullying prevention

We enable the moderator role in chats and forums to check conversations for hate speech, toxic comments, and aggressive statements. We can also implement a complaint button to enable users to report disrespectful behavior, helping moderators block abusive users.

AI- and ML-based analytics

AI analytics can help you discover insights, detect patterns, correlate different types of portal data, and perform root-cause analysis. You can analyze large amounts of user data more accurately to promote a personalized customer experience.

Develop your community portal with Itransition

Contact us

Related services

Data analytics

Data analytics

Itransition offers solutions to process and interpret your data and clarify key business dynamics for your data-driven decisions.

QA testing

We provide quality assurance consulting and testing services to detect and fix software vulnerabilities and ensure product security and efficiency.

Cloud consulting

Our team helps seamlessly migrate software to a cloud platform and provides cloud development, integration, and redesign services.

Salesforce consulting

Salesforce consulting

We offer consulting, migration, and customization services for companies to boost their community efficiency with Salesforce Service Cloud.

Community portals: popular questions answered

What is community portal development?

Community portal development is the creation of a virtual hub for knowledge sharing and communication among community members.

How much does it cost to build a community portal?

The cost of community portal development mainly depends on the complexity of the solution and can be affected by the scope of preliminary research, mobile and AI development, portal integrations, content management, and engagement features.

Can you create a portal that will precisely fit my community?

We tailor our solutions to the type and shared interests of your online community, adding the best-fitting functionality to meet the target audience’s expectations and your business needs.

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