Eric Sleeth / October 5, 2018An organization will implement a portal solution in hopes to increase productivity. When that new portal loses its shine and is no longer new, it could now be slowing down productivity! Here are some symptoms of a portal that is slowing down employee productivity:
Keeping organized is crucial for maximizing productivity. The benefit of the proper organization ultimately allows for easier adoption of processes for existing and new employees. Organization is important when designing and using a portal solution. All advisors will need to learn the new process of the new portal, it is important things are organized to ensure it feels intuitive and easy to remember into the future.
If the portal is disorganized, advisors will find it difficult to locate content, tools, or apps. This will waste time by having to click around looking for something but creates frustration and negative emotions towards the organization.
The desire for a financial enterprise to implement a portal solution is to streamline processes and increase output. While some of the tools or processes may be able to be replaced by the centralized portal, others may still need to remain active. Therefore, the portal must be able to easily integrate with all the different tools of the enterprise. Lack of integration asks the question “are the end-users able to copy easily export or copy information to other tools”.
User adoption and sustained usage are one of, if not the main metric to determine the success of a new portal solution. There are many reasons that could impact adoption, from organization, integration, usability, performance, etc. Another cause for advisors not fully adopting the new portal into their workflow could be caused by a lack of training and education. If advisors must do some self-discovery in order to learn the platform, this will negatively impact productivity. If a financial enterprise and the portal provider make the initial investment of training/educating the end-users, this will allow the advisors to hit the ground running and also have a point of contact if questions or issues arrive in the future.
How often will you exit a website if it takes too long to load? In fact, research shows that around 53% of visitors will leave if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. The user experience of a portal solution should be treated similarly. If your advisor portal is cumbersome, has long login times, and resources take a long time to open, this will create a negative experience amongst the end-users. Not only will this create frustrations and impact user adoption; it will also impact productivity and the bottom line. If during the span of a day, the time a user spends waiting adds up to about 20 minutes, multiply that across all the users over the span of weeks, months, or years. We can easily see the impact that a few seconds wasted waiting for a slow portal can have on the financial organization.
User interfaces and User experiences have become a key point of any software product. It is one of the cornerstone items that impact the perception and adoption of a platform. If your advisor team cannot intuitively navigate through the portal, this hurts productivity. They will need to spend time clicking around in search of what they are looking for. People have a tendency to develop habits, even in a difficult to navigate the portal. However, these habits will create errors. Furthermore, when an irregular task arises, the advisor will be back to clicking around in search of what they need.
These problems are focused around the user adoption of existing users, but navigation issues will have a negative impact on new users even more. They are not only learning new processes but are doing so in a portal that isn’t user friendly.
If any of these points resonate with you, we highly recommend evaluating your current advisor portal for areas of improvement. If you’d like to hear about how you can transform your advisor productivity, book a demo today.
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