IBM has a YouTube of Wheaton Worldwide’s presentation and case study. Their portal includes key content and a learning management system integrated to the portal. But the new functionality really integrated their business functions into the portal. That’s what I really like about this case study. Wheaton’s portal enables their business and uses the web as a value add channel for their agencies. Wheaton is like any other moving company. They rely on their independent agents throughout the US to do key things like win work, provider people to pack boxes, provide people to load the boxes and furniture into a truck, and even provide truck and long haul drivers to ship all that across the US. The people who use the system are focused on moving and aren’t focused on technology. It must be easy to use and it must allow those agents to do everything they need to create and manage orders and moves with Wheaton.
So start at 12 minutes if you want to dive into the meat of the presentation.
Key wins for them:
- Help Desk calls dropped to almost zero
- Calls to get more information about a move dropped significantly. More information is online and easy to find.
- Agents are posting and creating orders to the system without training
- Entire Agent portal provides a better competitive advantage. Wheaton can show how easy they are to work with while highlighting the relative difficulty of their competitors interactions.
- Rapid development from wireframe to working prototype really moved the project forward quickly
- The use of IBM’s Web Experience Factory helped to more quickly prototype and develop the portlets on the site.
