Transcript:
In this video, we’re going to cover the customer portal and how you can configure it to meet your needs. The most important question that people often have on the customer portal is: “What can my customers see when they log into customer portal?” They will run through a bunch of tests creating sample customers and things like that to try to get a feel for what their customers will see. I’m here to answer those questions for you right now.
First of all, to launch the customer portal, you can always do it from the main app. Click your name > customer portal, and it’ll launch the customer portal in a new browser tab. There you can see customer portal.
These are the different parts of the portal. Here you can search for items on the portal. Here you can click to add new tasks or tickets or anything that you’ve enabled.
You can filter your items by “all items” or just the items you submit. You can filter by status ( if you want to just see open or closed), within specific projects, and so forth. So these are all different filters that you can enable or disable.
If you click on a specific ticket or task or any of the items published on the portal, you can see things like the details, a description, you can create new threads, and you can see any attachments that are one it. This is a way of getting at the details of a specific ticket.
Now, let’s talk about what you can configure for this. Inside your main OneDesk application, if you’re administrator, you’ll see an administration icon. It’s also found up here under “administration”. Click that, and near the bottom you’ll see three pages related to the customer portal: customer portal, appearance, and forms.
“Appearance” allows you to do things like adjust the colors, or put a different language, a custom language, on your website instead of English. It also allows you to generate the snippet to insert on your website. This puts the side tab on your website. And it’s got a bunch of configuration options here. They’re all pretty self-explanatory with little explanations next to them. You can modify these. Where do you want it placed? What word do you want it to use? And so forth. This is some documentation here if you want additional details.
The “forms” page allows you to modify the form that the user sees when they click “add new” … for example, “add new ticket”. This form can be modified here. As you can see, we have a task and a ticket form. I can expand my ticket form, and see the configuration options for this form. Things I can do here are: change the title, change the subtitle, or I can delete it if I don’t want it at all.
I can add and remove properties to the form, including custom properties. I will have first have had to create those custom properties on my tickets application up here, but once those custom fields are added at the “all projects” level I can then add them to the form. You can select something, and add it to the form, and it will be displayed on the form.
You can change what word is next to a property on the form. For example, in this particular form here, I see “subject”, I see “description”, I see “priority”, and those are the exact same words that I have here. If I change this to priority … I change the text here, then when I refresh my form, you’ll see that I have changed the label right there. So all that is to show you that you can modify the text there, you can add and remove properties.
If I don’t want the form to appear at all, I can delete the entire form. I’ll show you an example of that with the task form. Here on the task form (If for example I only want to ask for tickets on my customer portal), I can then click “delete” > “yes”. Now when I go to my customer portal then, I only have my ticket form. So it’s very easy to modify those things here.
You can also send people directly to your forms without having to go through the customer portal. Some of our customers prefer to just have a form that their customers fill out. You can provide them with the link here, and they’ll complete this form, and they don’t have to go through the customer portal at all. It’s sort of a one-way, submit a ticket form.
That covers forms and appearance. Now, to get to the main question, which is “What can the customer do on the portal?” and “What can they see?” Select the “CUSTOMER PORTAL” tab here, and as you can see here is a link to your customer portal. Here is where you deactivate your customer portal if you don’t want to use it at all. I’ll show you that. Deactivate the customer portal. Now when I go to it, I get a message saying that it’s deactivated. Reactivate it, and I can make further modifications here.
“View previously submitted items” is a pretty basic control. It allows you to turn off the list of tickets. If I turn this off, and refresh the portal, you can see there’s no list of things. It’s uncommon to want that on while still having an active portal, but still it is possible.
When “Submitting new items”, you have three options:
– You allow your visitors to submit new items “never”. If you set it to never, they’ll never be able to submit new items. There’ll be no form and no button on the customer portal to submit.
– When logged in” means that they’ll see that button and be able to submit tickets when they are logged in.
– “When not logged in” means you don’t require them to be logged in for them to submit. However, when you choose this option, the form will ask them for their email address and will require that for them to submit the form.
Next is “What can the visitor do on the portal?” They can “register themselves”, “follow items”, or “see the status of items”. “See the status of items” and “follow items” are pretty self explanatory. I’ll turn them both on and show you where they are. Here is the follow button, and here is the status. If I turn these off, and I refresh my portal, you will see that both of those are gone. So now vistors can’t follow items, and they can’t see the status of items. You can turn them off independently or however you want.
“Register themselves” means that the customer can sign up. They’ll see the registration link, and if they visit your portal for the first time, they can sign up and start using the portal. However, if you don’t want this to happen, uncheck this box, and that will mean that for your customers to be able to use the portal you’ll have to add them under the customers application over here, and then invite them.
Here, we have the filters to show on the panel. As you can see, there’s three kinds of filters. There’s the “item type filter”, the “project filter”, and the “status filter”. Those are also pretty self-explanatory. They allow these filter categories to appear on the side. These ones at the top: filters for “all items”, “my items”, and “followed items”, are always there. These ones “by type” (knowledge-base article, tasks, tickets…), are controlled by the “type” checkbox. “By project”, is controlled by the “project” checkbox, and “by status”, by the “status” checkbox. As you might expect, when I uncheck these and refresh the portal, we have much fewer options. Only “by status” is available here on the side. So it controls what filters are available to your customers.
This note is important to understand. It says “The filter options will only appear when a visitor has results for that filter.” What that means is that open, closed, and pending agent are the only statuses that I have here. Not necessarily because those are the only statuses that exist for tickets, but because those are the only ones that I would have results for.
Alright, now, the meat of the question of “What items can the visitor see on the portal?” First of all, do you require login to see items? This is quite common. It comes by default unchecked, just so that when you try out your portal you’ll see some stuff for the first time, but if you require a login to see items, this is also a very common change to make right at the beginning.
And finally, what would you like them to see? This is the number one rule you will have to determine. By default it’s set to “all published items” so that you see some stuff when you first try playing around with your OneDesk account. However, it’s highly likely you’ll want to make a change to this.
For example, the simplest option is just to restrict it so customers “only see their own requested items”. This means that for a customer, if they are tagged as the requester of a specific ticket ( and that’s either because they requested it or because you set them as requester), then they will see that on the customer portal. If you select “items created by customers in their organization”, then they’ll be able to see things that are requested by themselves or by other people in the same customer organization. Once again, the “customers” application is where you’ll group your customers together into organizations. This means that if you have two customers from Company A, and you would like them to see each other’s tickets, you can choose this option.
“Items in the projects they are following”: This means that if you’ve added customers as followers on your projects, then they’ll be able to see the items inside those projects. This is useful option if you do projects for specific customers. So you might say, “I’m doing this project; It’s for a specific customer; and I am open to them seeing all the items in this project.” Then you use this setting; you add them to the project; and they can see all the items inside the project.
Next is ” items created by customers in their organization and items in the projects they are following”. It’s a combination of the previous two. They can see both those things.
Next another combination, “all their own requested items and items in the projects they are following”. this selection means visitors will see their own stuff and items in the projects they’re following. This is also a common choice. If you’re doing project-based work for your customers, then you’ll want them to see items in the projects they are following and their own requested items in case they submit stuff that’s not yet in the project.
And finally, the default, which is “all published items”. Now, published items means that the ticket will have a published status. This is like an overall rule, which says if something is published, they can see it. This gives you granular-level control over removing something from the portal. By default, when you create something, it will be published. You can of course change this default, but if you don’t play around with things too much, when you create a new item it will be published. This means that if you’d like to remove something from the portal, you just uncheck the “publish” box on that ticket. And here you can make an exception and say the “visitor can see their own unpublished items”.
You might decide that you’d like for customers to see items in the projects they are following and all their own unpublished items, regardless. So this is a control that you can combine. Playing around with these two options will pretty much give you every variation that you’re looking for. The most commonnly used options are to use “items created by customers in their organization” and “items in the projects they are following”. Requiring login is the most common choice as well.
So take a look at my screen now. Probably you’ll configure it the way I have it here, and you’ll make your choice between items created by customers in his organization and items in the projects they are following. You’ll probably make a choice between one of those two. If you have questions get in touch and we’ll help you out.
So that sums up what you can show your customers on the customer portal. And if you go to the tickets section, here’s where you’ll create those custom fields I mentioned. This is the tickets administration. If you actually go to the tickets themselves, in the main app, and you open a ticket’s details, you’ll see the publish box. This indicates that this item is published. By default, newly created items are published, but of course, you can change that default so that newly created items are not. But you’d have to go and remove and change some rules in the administration to do that.
So once again, contact us here if you have any questions, and I hope this answers some of the basics of what can my customers see and do on the customer portal. Thank you.