In this period of fierce competition and challenging economic times, businesses are seeking ways to increase their competitive advantage. This is particularly important for business-to-consumer businesses in sectors such as consumer banking, retail, and insurance. Quality customer service is a key differentiator. One method to improve service is to allow consumers to serve themselves by providing frequently used services over the Web. This is the heart of the consumer self-service solution.

In this series, the IBM® Software Group Horizontal Integration Analysis Team and IBM International Technical Support Organization teams introduce you to and take you through the details of developing a consumer self-service solution with IBM products and tools and open standards-based technologies. Beyond the introduction, each article in the series describes a building block needed to construct the solution. Each of these summary articles then points you to a redbook that guides you through the technical details involved in using each building block. The major building blocks involved in developing a consumer self-service solution are to:

• Build a secure portal.
• Establish a single sign-on process for the portal.
• Enable collaboration through the portal.
• Aggregate user information on the portal.
• Develop and deploy rich clients on the portal.

Link to project implementation.