Extranets and Intranets

n extranet is a good way to provide things like tiered pricing for your distributors. It also allows you to create secure login areas where your consumers can manage their account or their orders. Really, you can create any type of workflow that’s consistent with what your business offers, and bring it directly to the user – often cutting a tremendous amount of overhead and opening up new opportunities for feedback channels.

You can gather tremendous insights from extranet usage patterns. We recently built an extranet site for a client containing compliance material. It allowed them to see what materials their users were requesting and what paths they were taking. We built in some fairly extensive reporting features so they could monitor the flow and see exactly what the interest areas were for compliance. This allowed them to optimize training for their software based on the needs or interests expressed by users.

That level of responsiveness kept users engaged through the training material – long enough to show them the benefits of additional functionality they weren’t using yet.

What you do with an extranet or intranet component, of course, depends entirely on your brand, but both provide a good, solid communications platform that can have substantial utility value. On the other hand, we’ve often seen far too much invested in company intranets with little return. If your people are very attuned to what’s happening in the digital space, then the intranet might have more value – or a whole lot less, since there are many other online utilities competing for their attention.

Say you’re a manufacturing facility, where 85% of the population comes in for a shift, does their job and leaves. They might not hang out on the intranet reading news, but they might take advantage of HR forms libraries and benefit summaries posted there.