Customer Portal EBTS: how a design system gets truckers back on the road faster
Every minute a truck sits idle costs money. As a fleet manager, you want to be able to call in roadside assistance as quickly and efficiently as possible. At EBTS, that's now even faster thanks to a redesigned customer portal. Their developers handled the technical side and we took care of the UX. Including a design system as part of a white-label solution.
About EBTS
When a truck is forced to pull over, EBTS springs into action. The roadside assistance specialist operates from their headquarters in Hasselt across several European countries. The company employs around 200 people.
Challenge: design as part of the white label engine
A truck with engine trouble? The driver calls the fleet manager, who in turn contacts EBTS. This happens through a customer portal where the incident is logged. Based on that information, the EBTS team finds a solution to get the driver back on the road.
That customer portal is therefore a crucial link in the process. The more user-friendly and high-performing it is, the faster the cargo is moving again — and the happier the customer.
To further improve customer satisfaction, EBTS took the platform in hand. Making the code and back end more performant? That was a job for their in-house developers. But they lacked the UX expertise to also optimise the front end: the screens their customers actually work in.
That's where they brought us in.
Challenge one: optimise our current design. So that it's as simple as possible for users to report a problem on one hand, and EBTS gets all the information it needs to provide assistance on the other.
Challenge two: make it scalable. EBTS sells this customer portal as a white label solution to other companies, each time adopting the look and feel of that specific business. So implementing a new client's brand identity needs to be straightforward.
The redesigned interface: cleaner and calmer. And therefore easier to work with.
When we showed the concept of a design system, EBTS immediately said: That's what we need.
— Johan Steppe, Digital product studio lead at ACA Group
Solution: from over and over and over again to drag and drop
Our UX experts started with a thorough audit. Together with EBTS, we examined every screen.
- Which flows can be made more logical?
- Which screens are too cluttered?
- Where are the pain points and how can we resolve them?
Optimisation: check ✅
The next challenge: scalability.
Johan Steppe, Digital Innovation Lead: "For this customer portal, a design system is a great solution. When we showed the benefits, EBTS was immediately on board: That's what we need."
So what are those benefits?
"In such a system, we first establish all the rules for the visual design. We define all the components: a button should look like this, a dropdown is shaped this way, until all those parameters have been set."
Design system: the library that saves you money
Then we work out the design for all those components. The result is a library of fixed building blocks.
Designing a new screen? Simply drag those components into place and you're done. Implementing a client's full brand identity as part of your white label solution? The components are already there, so it's just a matter of setting the colours, and you can do that for all elements at once. All of this adds up to significant savings on development hours.
Ready to use: the design components we created. Faster for building pages and always on brand.
Approach: towards a new customer portal, sprint by sprint
We worked in short sprints, each with clear deliverables. Johan: "That provides structure and keeps up the momentum."
"We calculated upfront how many sprints would be needed. That allowed us to give EBTS a clear picture of the budget and timeline straight away. Every few days we showed their team what we had designed and discussed the next steps."
With success: we met the deadline.
Our new customer portal is intuitive, visually appealing and specially designed to optimise the workflows of our customers and service partners.
— Dimitri Riez, Business Development and IT Manager at EBTS
The same foundation three times, three different visual styles: the EBTS portal and the versions for clients Goodyear and Hydroparts, who in turn offer this platform to their own customers.
The result: a faster solution for EBTS's clients. And their clients.
For EBTS:
- Better service. A more performant portal, enabling them to serve their customers even better.
- Cost savings. A white label design they can quickly and easily customise for their clients themselves.
- One point of contact. We took care of everything related to UX and design.
For customers and service partners:
- A faster solution. Because logging a case is now easier.
- Peace of mind. A tailored portal they can offer to their own customers.
For the truck driver: back on the road sooner.
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