Beyond the Portal: Cbeyond Enhances Partnerships with Exemplary Management Tool

In order to deliver competitive business services, the business you service most may be your own.

Case in point: Cbeyond® (NASDAQ: CBEY) — a leading provider of “big business” communications and IT solutions to more than 42,000 small businesses across the U.S. — sought guidance from Sherpa! Web Studios when it needed to overhaul its channel partner portal and account management tool, Cbeyond PartnerAccess.

CHALLENGE
With the goal of increasing partner productivity through improved usability, automating manual processes, and providing real-time reporting, this portal refresh initiative addressed the following areas:

• Consistent Branding: Change brand of the website to be in line with current Cbeyond brand
• Intuitive Organization: Simplified system for collateral, sales order forms, and training materials
• Timely Communication: Better communication of product updates and ability to update website based on channel feedback
• Tight Integration: Ability to integrate multiple internal systems for better reports and real-time information

They also created some innovative features, such as the PDF Proposal Generator, which took what was once complicated Excel spreadsheets and simplified them into a single web form that could be printed or emailed as a branded, personalized PDF.

The beauty of business lies in how one powerful partnership can strengthen many others, directly and indirectly, measurably and immeasurably. The Cbeyond portal now provides a custom-tailored experience for partners with greatly enhanced functionality:

• Dashboard Overview: Provides partners a top-level view of recent status updates, online resources, including on-demand sales and marketing materials
• Streamlined Navigation: Enables partners to find all relevant information in three clicks or less
• Powerful New Features: Serviceability look-up tool, complete customer account management, in-depth compensation reporting
• On-Demand Marketing: Ability to create customized proposals and co-branded marketing materials in real-time
• Improved Accessibility: Support extended for partner-preferred browsers

RESULTS
In six months after the launch, traffic to the site more than doubled — a process that continued as Cbeyond expanded into new markets and regions with the portal as a key selling point. In addition, metrics for all levels of user engagement greatly increased.

In essence, partners visited more frequently, more in depth, with more confidence in the system.

• 120% increase in number of pageviews per visit
• 67% decrease in bounce rate
• 89% increase in average time on site
• 145% increase in returning visitors, 18% increase in new visitors
• 80% of page-views are outside of dashboard, showing usage of new features
• 187% increase in visitors returning more than 10+ times per month

The project was selected as a finalist for a Client Advisor Award, which “celebrates the importance of the professional services sector to the Atlanta economy and set the standard for professionalism by honoring advisors and clients who consistently and cooperatively foster and grow successful client advisor relationships.”