In this video, Lee Nagel and Lawrence Buckley discuss the decision-making process for developing a customer portal in-house versus using a purpose-built platform. They explore the importance of understanding customer expectations and the operational realities of building or buying a portal solution. The discussion includes insights into cost considerations, integration challenges, and the role of AI in enhancing customer experience.
- Most lending organizations face a customer portal gap: while digital expectations keep rising, the majority of portals still fail to deliver the seamless, self-service experiences customers now consider standard in other industries.
- The build-versus-buy decision for customer portals is not binary; it is a continuum where organizations must balance customer expectations against their own capacity to build, integrate, secure, and continuously improve a portal over many years.
- AI, integrations, security, and cost must all be evaluated as part of a long-term, holistic customer-experience strategy, because launching a portal is not a one-time project but the starting point of an ongoing operational commitment to maintain and modernize it.