The customer portal: where customers track their requests

Customers reach it from the profile icon under Requests, and a customer who can reopen a solved request with a follow-up does not open a second ticket.

Customers reach the portal from the profile icon at the top right of any help centre page, under Requests. It is the quiet feature that removes a whole category of ticket, largely because a customer who can reopen a solved request with a follow-up does not open a second one.

What customers can do there

• Submit requests and track open and solved tickets.
• Add comments, and add CCs, on any request that is not closed. On a closed one the follow-up is the only route.
• Reopen a solved request with a follow-up, which is a new ticket carrying the old one's history rather than the same ticket reopened.
• Withdraw a request by marking it solved themselves, but only once it has been assigned to an agent. On an unassigned request the option is not there.
• Send CSAT feedback.
• Filter and search by ticket fields, and show or hide columns from the option button.

The tickets it prevents

Duplicates, above all. A customer who cannot find their earlier request opens a new one, and now you have two conversations about one problem. The follow-up route matters here: without it, "my problem came back" arrives as a fresh ticket with none of the history.

It also removes a good share of "any update?" messages, because they can look.

Sharing across an organisation

An Organization requests link appears in the portal, but only for people in a shared organization. It shows the requests of everybody in that organization, and where an administrator has set it up, they can comment on each other's.

Somebody who belongs to more than one organization gets a dropdown beside the search bar to choose which one they are looking at.

Sharing is a real disclosure decision, so make it deliberately. Where your customers are companies it is often exactly what they want, because somebody covering for a colleague on holiday can see what was asked. Other organisations would find it unwelcome.

It needs sign-in

Which is why email verification and sign-in options matter here more than elsewhere. A customer who cannot sign in cannot see their requests, and that is where most of the friction is.

Tell people it exists

A link in your email notifications is what gets customers there. Most customers never discover the portal otherwise, and a feature nobody knows about prevents nothing.

See also

• Request visibility across brands
• Why does my customer not see their colleague's tickets
• Verifying an end user's email address