The customer portal is where your customers raise requests, follow them and reply, without writing an email. It's at https://intellidesk.co/portal, branded with your company's name and colours. This article walks through what your customers experience, so you can recommend it with confidence.
Signing in
Customers sign in with their email address. There's no password to remember and no account to create:
- They enter their email and click Continue.
- IntelliDesk emails them a 6-digit code, valid for 5 minutes.
- They type it in and they're in. The session lasts 7 days.
Anyone who has already emailed you, used your website form or chatted is already a contact, so they can sign in straight away. If they're a customer of more than one company that uses IntelliDesk, they pick which one.
Customers who prefer a password can set one under Account once they're signed in, and then use Sign in with password instead. Five wrong attempts lock sign-in for a short while.
The portal home page
After signing in, customers see:
- A search box that searches your published help articles, so they can find an answer before asking.
- Browse articles by topic, and your most popular articles.
- Your tickets, with their status.
- Submit a ticket.
- Any notices you've published for the portal, and the service status if you run a status page.
Raising and following a request
Submit a ticket asks for the help desk to send it to (only desks with the portal switched on are listed), a subject, a description and optional attachments (up to 10 files, 25 MB each). It becomes a ticket in your inbox straight away, labelled Customer portal so your team knows where it came from.
On a ticket, customers see the whole public conversation and can reply right there. Their reply reaches you like an email reply: the ticket moves to Customer responded. They get your replies by email as usual too.
After you close a ticket
When a desk has satisfaction surveys on, the customer is asked how you did: one to five stars and an optional comment. The results appear in your reports.
What customers don't see
- Internal notes
- Tags, priority, the assignee and SLA timers
- Other customers' tickets, even from the same company
- Tickets on help desks where the portal is switched off
Setting it up
- Turn the portal on per desk: Settings → Help Desks → desk → Settings → Customer portal. Desks with it off don't appear in the portal, and their tickets aren't listed.
- Brand it: Settings → Portal Branding: display name, logo, colour, tagline and footer, and whether to show "Powered by IntelliDesk".
- Change requests: turn on Allow change-request submissions on a contact (Contacts → contact → Edit), and they'll see a separate form for requesting changes, which creates a card on a project board.
Single-ticket links
Customers who use your website form get a confirmation email (when auto-reply is on) with a link to view and reply to that one ticket without signing in. The link works for 30 days from when it was sent. After that, the customer can sign in to the portal to see the ticket.
Related: The embeddable widget: putting a contact form on your site · Contacts and companies · Reports and analytics