Notes from the room
Noraini Hassan, operations, wholesale foods distributor, Klang Valley — Portal Usage Review
“They spent two mornings with our billing clerks, not with a projector. By the debrief we could point at the exact invoice list our Penang buyers abandon after the third filter. I still wish the brief had come a week earlier — we had already printed a new user guide that described a path nobody takes. We pulped the guide. That was on us, not on Utilitycorner.”
Daniel Chong, account director, freight forwarding, Penang — Onboarding Funnel Study
“Our invite looked polite and complete. Priya laid the last month of invites next to first logins and showed that the people who made it in were the ones whose account manager had already sent the password in WhatsApp. The portal invite was decoration. We shortened the letter and made the manager’s message the official one. Awkward, and accurate.”
Siti Mahmud, practice manager, engineering consultancy, Ipoh — Feature Adoption Review
“We had built a document library because a partner insisted clients would fetch drawings themselves. Aisha’s reading was quiet: a handful of internal staff used it as a filing cabinet. Clients still asked us to email the PDF. She did not dress that up. We stopped pretending the library was a client feature and labelled it as staff storage. The partner was not pleased. I was.”
Arun Pillai, claims operations, regional insurer — Portal Usage Review
“The useful part was pairing sessions with the ticket queue. We had been arguing about a slow claims form. The records showed most clients never opened the form; they photographed a letter and sent it to their agent. The form was not slow. It was beside the point. We still have the form. We stopped spending meeting time on its order of fields.”
A longer sitting: statements in the e-invoice months
A Johor manufacturer asked us to read the statements area of their client portal in the months when LHDN-related questions were landing on the finance desk. The portal already showed invoices. Clients still rang to ask whether a document was “the one for the tax people”.
Lim Wei Jie mapped the event names to the three statement screens, sampled a quarter, and sat with two finance clerks for a morning. The trail showed clients opening the newest invoice, downloading it, and leaving. The annual statement — the piece finance thought was the point of the portal — was almost untouched. The clerks already knew that in their bones; they had not been able to put it in a brief the IT vendor would accept.
The debrief was uncomfortable. The vendor’s representative wanted a feature list. The clerks wanted a single screen that matched the email finance already sent. Utilitycorner’s brief named that mismatch and stopped. We were not hired to redraw the screen. Six weeks later the manufacturer wrote to say they had hidden the annual statement behind the invoice that clients already opened, and the phone queries had thinned. That change was theirs. The reading was ours.
If a story like this is the kind of work you need, ask for a scoping conversation.