Private customer portals are, well, private. Even for an industry leader, developing a B2B portal without visibility into competitors’ private areas carries significant risks, such as:

• Competitive Blind Spots: Designing digital processes without seeing the «logged-in» experience of other European players left the company exposed to sudden improvements in service value by competitors that were invisible from the outside.
• Missed Opportunities: A lack of cross-border perspective meant a risk of overlooking innovations that other market leaders were already using to their advantage.
• Strategic Risk: Without knowing what others were doing, it was difficult to ensure that Swisscom’s B2B offering remained the best one in the market.

To solve this, The Art of Ecommerce built a methodology based on real-world evidence rather than theoretical audits:

1. Specific Criteria: We created a list of guidelines designed specifically for the B2B telecom sector and this particular use case.
2. Real-World Testing: We went beyond public websites. We hired local partners, opened real accounts, purchased devices and paid invoices, exactly as a B2B customer would.
3. The Experience Score: We distilled thousands of observations into a single score, providing a clear comparison of how each company performs in the eyes of the user.

The project resulted in an interactive report that provided a complete map for future development:

• Comprehensive Scope: We analyzed and reported on every critical step of the B2B customer journey, including areas such as invoice review and payments, service procurement, incident management (support tickets), documentation access, or asset and location management.
• In-Depth Analysis: Over 2,000 datapoints organized into 24 categories, covering the entire B2B journey from onboarding to invoicing.
• Actionable Findings: We identified 24 significant opportunities for improvement, focused on closing functional gaps and increasing the direct benefit to the customer.

The benchmark allowed us to extract three major conclusions regarding the state of the European B2B telco market:

• The Privacy Effect on Architecture: The closed nature of these customer portals heavily impacts how they are built. Because companies develop their platforms without visibility into their competitors’ setups, the variety of architectures and functionalities across the industry is far broader and more fragmented than what is typically seen on public, open websites.
• Validation of Swisscom’s Leadership: Confirming initial expectations, the research verified that Swisscom ranks firmly among the European leaders in terms of both the quality and functional depth of its B2B customer portal.
• Uncovering Hidden Opportunities: By examining the ecosystem as a whole, the comprehensive analysis revealed clear, strategic opportunities to improve customer service through the customer portal—insights that likely would have remained undetected without this holistic, cross-border view.

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