Customer portal
Let requesters follow their tickets, reply and raise new requests from a private link, without an account.
Project → Settings → Customer portal
The customer portal is where requesters (your workspace may call them customers or employees) follow their tickets without an account. From one private link they see every ticket you have shared with them, reply to any of them and raise new requests. Your workspace also gets a public landing page that points to the help center and the incident report form.
Turn the portal on for a project
- Open the project and choose its Settings tab.
- In the Customer portal section (named after your workspace's word for requesters), tick Accept incidents reported by customers through the public portal.
- Choose Save changes.
This one switch opens the project to the incident report form, to new requests raised in the portal, to portal sign-in by email and to company sign-in. While no project has it on, none of these work. The project lead, Owners and Admins can change it.
Tickets that arrive with no agent behind them are attributed to the project lead, so set a lead on each portal project. Their priority is worked out from your priority keyword rules.
How requesters get in
There is no password. A requester reaches the portal through a private link, in one of three ways.
- You send it. On the requester's record, the portal link card has Issue a portal link. Copy the link and send it yourself; issuing it sends no email. New link replaces it (the old one stops working at once) and Revoke closes it. This needs permission to manage requesters.
- They ask for it. The help center's Your requests link opens a sign-in page. They enter the email address they contact you from and choose Email me my link. The link is emailed only if that address already belongs to an active requester; the page says the same thing either way, so it does not reveal who is on file.
- Company sign-in. If your workspace uses OpenID Connect single sign-on, turn on Let customers sign in to the portal with it in Settings → Single sign-on. The sign-in page then offers Sign in with your company account. Anyone your identity provider verifies goes straight to their requests, and a requester record is created on their first sign-in. This is available on plans that include Single Sign-On, and not with SAML.
What requesters see
The portal lists the requester's shared tickets, newest first, in Open and Closed groups (up to 200). Each shows the key, title, status, when it was opened and resolved, and its priority.
- Opening a ticket, or choosing Reply on an open one, goes to its conversation page, where they read your public replies and answer.
- If your status page is on, a Service status link and card appear.
Only tickets shared with the requester appear. Tickets raised through the report form, the portal and the chat widget are shared automatically.
Raising a new request
When the portal's projects have service catalog items, a Request a service card comes first: pick a request type (grouped by category, with search), answer its questions and submit — approvals the type needs start straight away. See The service catalog. For anything else, the New request card asks for a Subject (required) and Details, plus About to pick the project when more than one is open to the portal. Send request creates a support ticket linked to the requester and opens its conversation page straight away.
The portal has no attachments, no way to close or reopen a ticket, and no service catalog. Requests from the catalog are raised by agents in the app.
The public landing page
Each workspace has a public page at /public/ followed by its URL name. It shows your logo, name and description, your business hours if you use them, and two cards: Help Center and Report an Incident. The report card is dimmed when no project accepts reports. Branding comes from Settings → Workspace.
Answering from the app
Requester replies arrive on the ticket and in Chat in the sidebar. When you comment on the ticket, tick Visible to customer for the requester to see it; unticked comments stay internal and never reach the portal. If email replies to requesters are turned on under Settings → Email intake, the requester is also emailed with a link back to the conversation.