Answer
A staged start with selected customers usually makes sense. This group should have real, recurring cases and be willing to give concrete feedback. Accounts, roles and data are first set up for a limited functional area. In parallel, a clear existing contact channel remains available, so that no customer is left alone with an incomplete portal.
The rollout should measure whether customers can actually complete their task themselves: do they find documents, do they understand statuses and do orders arrive correctly? Click counts alone are not enough. Follow-up questions and abandoned attempts show where internal terms or data do not yet fit. After this stabilisation, further customers, roles and functions can follow. A “pilot” must not be a non-binding demo experiment, but a contractually defined first scope that can be used in production.
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As of 3 September 2026
Further reading
Related topic: B2B customer portal