The Benefits of a Customer Portal in Your LIMS & How to Set One Up

Imagine: it’s 4:00 pm on a Friday, and you receive another email from a customer asking about their test results. Maybe it’s one more email on a chain stretching into the dozens, or it’s from a client concerned about slow turnaround times. 

Whatever it is, at a certain point, it’s hard not to find a reason to provide a self-service interface between clients and your lab. Setting that up safely and compliantly, though, can be a challenge.

In this guide, we’ll show you what a self-service portal can do when integrated with a LIMS, why your lab should consider adding one, and how you can set one up in an afternoon.

What can a Customer Portal do?

If your LIMS has a customer portal (like QBench does), then there’s plenty that you can do to offer self-serve functionality for your clients – whether those are external clients (for a contract testing lab) or internal clients (other departments within your company).

A client portal integrated with your LIMS can save your lab (and customers) hundreds of hours per year. For instance, a customer portal can allow you to:

• Provide real-time status updates
• Download PDF reports
• Send invoices 
• Plan capacity in your lab
• Manage account relationships

But it can also allow your customers to:

• Submit sample details remotely
• Upload sample details in bulk
• Get alerts on issues with samples and prompts for resubmission
• Place orders
• Communicate with the lab
• View order and test results history
• Manage billing and view invoice history
• Check for test results
• Download test results and COAs

Imagine: it’s a Monday morning. Instead of starting the week with 10 voicemails and a dozen emails, you arrive to find clients have already accessed their results, downloaded reports, and submitted new orders. 

There’s real ROI here, by the way. 

Even if your client portal saves each member of your team 1 hour per week, for a staff of 10, that’s 500+ hours saved each year, and going by the average lab tech salary ($60,000/year, roughly $29/hour), that could be up to $15,00 saved each year for your lab. 

And that’s ignoring the opportunity cost – the more time you spend back-and-forth with one customer, the less time you have to service more. Every hour your staff saves on administrative tasks is an hour that can be put toward more important work or expanding your capacity.

We’re just scratching the surface; read on for the benefits of an integrated client portal in your LIMS and guidance on how to set one up.

Benefits of an Integrated Client Portal in Your LIMS

Yes, a customer portal saves time, but there are other key benefits worth mentioning too:

• Saves time
• Provides a great customer experience
• Improves data integrity
• Organizes communication
• Speeds up billing and collections 

Let’s walk through each one next.

Saves Hours of Time

As illustrated above, a customer portal integrated into your LIMS can save hours each week for your staff. Rather than rely on email back-and-forth, a self-service interface allows clients to handle requests and free up your staff for more pressing work. 

From sample statuses to test results and project timelines, a customer-facing portal can eliminate hours of busy work from your staff’s schedule.

Provides a Great Customer Experience​​

Beyond saving you time, a customer-facing portal offers a better client experience than you could on your own.

Whether you service external customers or internal ones, by providing a self-service option, your customers now have 24/7 access to your lab. This allows them to submit samples, track progress, view results, and download reports at their convenience rather than being limited by your workflows and business hours. 

The self-service nature of the portal empowers your customers with immediate access to their data, creating a sense of transparency and control that builds trust and satisfaction with the laboratory's services.

Improves Data Integrity

A customer-facing portal can help with compliance, too!

Data integrity can be improved by providing a structured portal for customers to interact with rather than relying on informal channels like email or the phone. By setting up guardrails in your client portal to require sample submissions to include required metadata and formats, you can cut down on costly transcription errors that easily occur otherwise.

This is especially important for labs operating under FDA, ISO 17025, or GxP regulations, where a customer portal isn’t just a matter of convenience; it's a compliance necessity. Manual processes create documentation gaps that can trigger audit findings. A properly configured portal creates automatic audit trails, ensures data integrity, and demonstrates your commitment to quality systems.

Organizes Communication​​

There’s little worse than a lost email thread, or an email thread stretching into the dozens.

You can streamline client communication and organize every interaction in a client portal by eliminating costly back-and-forth. This ensures that all messages, status updates, and files are centralized in one place and easily accessible to your lab and your clients. 

By configuring workflows and automations, you can also ensure that requests are routed to the appropriate personnel on your staff and handled properly.

Speeds Up Billing and Collections 

For contract testing labs, a customer portal provides another handy benefit: it speeds up billing and collections.

Rather than chase down dozens (or hundreds) of customers at a time – and risk late or missed payments – you can configure the portal to only release test results once payment has been received for an order. Voilà, your customers are paying on time. 

How to Set up a Customer Portal in Your LIMS

Some LIMS platforms offer built-in customer portal functionality, making it a snap to set up. If your LIMS does not provide such functionality, you’ll need to set up an external integration to connect to your LIMS.

We’ll use QBench’s customer portal feature to provide an example of how to set this up for your lab. All you need to do is follow these steps:

1. Brand your portal
2. Configure your settings
3. Review and publish!

Brand Your Portal

It’s helpful to brand your customer portal to make sure the experience between your website and the portal is cohesive. 

With QBench, you can customize the appearance of your customer portal, including the title, background color, logos, and more:

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This makes your customer portal look good and ensures it feels like a seamless experience with your company. Branding is the easy part; next comes a host of settings you can configure to control the behavior of your portal.

Configure Your Settings

Once you’ve customized the look and feel of your portal, you can customize the behavior and functionality for your clients.

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With QBench, you can customize what customers see and are able to do, including fine-tuning for:

• Assays and their pricing
• Volume and panel discounts
• Rush order pricing
• Project visibility
• Sample requirements for order requests
• Required fields for submissions
• Bulk sample uploads
• Access to test results
• Self-service account creation
• Billing and invoice management
• Customer account creation and password reset emails
• User roles and permissions (including custom roles)

And more! Each module also supports its own settings to toggle on and customize. What’s more, you can even configure automated emails and templates based on customer actions.

Review and Publish Your Client Portal

Once your settings are configured, it’s time to review and go live.

QBench allows you to test your portal to make sure it looks good before publishing. In addition to ordering functionality, you can also create a help center for clients to show them around and walk them through your specific processes. This allows you to provide your clients with a fantastic customer experience and save even more time for your team by anticipating and answering questions. 

Once everything is set up, take your portal live and start accepting orders and samples from clients! In as little as a few hours, you can fully configure and ship a self-service client portal that empowers your customers while saving your team hours of time.

Download the Free LIMS Guide to Make Sure You Select the Right LIMS

Looking for a LIMS with a built-in (or integrated) customer portal? You have plenty of options to choose from. 

You need to make sure you choose the right one for your lab. What’s the right LIMS? Well, it could be one that…

• Matches your budget
• Provides the right integrations (along with a RESTful API for custom connections)
• Gives you the right blend of configurability with ease of use
• Is flexible enough for your changing needs
• Offers a speedy and painless implementation

But plenty of LIMS platforms claim to offer those and more. Click the button below to download the free LIMS Buyer’s Guide to learn more about what types of LIMS are available to you and determine which one is right for your lab.