Using the Customer Support Portal

Every person who raises a support ticket in your helpdesk through any channel automatically becomes a contact. You can make your customers create an account in your support portal and have them login before they create a ticket or look at your Knowledge Base and Forums. Alternatively, they can also use single-sign-on through Google, Facebook or Twitter to login. 

In general, the email address will be the primary field for the contacts. If the customer logs in through Twitter or Facebook, the primary field will be the Twitter handle and/or the Facebook user name (populates the Full Name field in the contact information) respectively.

Creating an account in your support portal

A new user can create an account by clicking Sign up in the upper-right corner of the helpdesk:

The Signup form will collect the user's name and email address. You can also set up captcha to prevent spam. 

Registered users can click on Login in the upper-right corner of the customer portal. (New users can too, and then use the SSO options to login for the first time.)

If you would like to restrict your customers from signing up and/or logging into the customer portal, you can modify the settings as required under Admin > Channels > Portals > Settings. A quick guide on how you can customize this access can be found here.

Note: You can enable the User Activation email for new users to make your account secure from spammers. Once a user signs up, an email notification containing the activation URL is sent to them on their registered email address; they can click on it and create a password for their Freshdesk account. This can be managed under Admin > Workflows> Email Notifications > Requester Notification. The User Activation email will also be sent out when the contact raises a ticket for the first time in your helpdesk via any channel.

Creating tickets from Portal:

Now that the customer has signed into their account on your support portal, they would be able to view your KBase, Forums and also raise support tickets. By default, anybody visiting your support portal can submit support requests and view your knowledge base and forums without logging in. You can also force them to log in before they can use your portal (Learn how).

Quick guide to creating support tickets on the customer portal

• After your customers login (based on your Portal settings), they can click on the New support ticket button as indicated:

• They will be taken to your ticket form where they can fill out information like their 'Email Address, 'Subject' and a 'Description' of the issue they are facing, along with the additional information such as 'Name', 'Phone Number' or the 'Type' of the issue. They can also attach files to their tickets.
• If you have your Knowledge Base set up, Freshdesk will suggest the solution articles based on what they type in the subject box. This will help your customers get a solution without reaching your support and will also help deflect tickets on your account.
• Once they hit the 'Submit' button, their ticket will be created in your helpdesk with the 'Source' field value set to Portal.
• The ticket requester will be taken to the public ticket page where they can check the status of the ticket, add replies and notes to it when needed

Quick guide to checking tickets' progress

At any point, the requesters would be able to login and check the status of the tickets they have raised by clicking on the Check ticket status link, as shown below:

A ticket can have various statuses. The requester can filter out tickets based on the 'Status' by using the drop-down above the list of tickets:

All Tickets view

Choosing All Tickets will show every ticket raised by the requester in the helpdesk, no matter what the status of the tickets is.

Open or Pending tickets

For an agent, every ticket that comes in will be in the Open status by default. The agent can change the status of the ticket to Pending when they are awaiting a response from the requester or if they're waiting for more information from a third party. The SLA timers do not run when a ticket status is Pending. For a requester, all open or pending tickets have a status of Being processed (modifiable).

Resolved or Closed

The ticket is marked as Resolved when the agent provides the solution for the customer's question/issue. The ticket is marked as Closed when the customer confirms resolution of the ticket.

The customer will be able to reply to the ticket at any point of time to reopen it in case of further questions.