If you have signed up for Freshdesk or Omnichannel after March 30, 2022, you can read more about accessing your Customer Portal in this article.
Article Overview
By default, when you sign up for a Freshdesk account, your helpdesk is split into two sections:
- Agent Portal - This is the Freshdesk agent interface you see when you log in to your account. On the agent portal, you can respond to incoming tickets, add knowledge base articles, check out reports, and so on. If you're an Administrator, you can also manage additional settings, add support reps and pay for your Freshdesk account.
- Customer Portal - This is the portal where your customers can register themselves, browse through your Knowledge Base, engage on your Forums, and raise and track their tickets.
If you'd like to learn how your customers can use your support portal, please check out this folder.
As an Administrator, you can configure your support portal to be exactly how you want. For example, you could rebrand it to change how it looks, decide who gets to access it, or even enable Single Sign-On with popular services to make it easy for customers to log in.
How to control access to your portal
Login to Freshdesk as an Admin.
- Go to Admin > Portals > Access Control.
- A list of options lets you tweak the accessibility of your portals.
User Sign-up and Login
Allow users to sign-up on the portal
If you want to store the information of the user raising a ticket, you can have new users sign up from your public portal.
Allow users to sign in using
You can also let your customers log into Freshdesk with their Google or Facebook credentials. This speeds up the sign-in process for your customers and lets you track who logs in.
How to Customize your portal settings
Hover over the portal you would like to customize and click on Edit and click on Manage Sections
Manage Sections
Ticket
You can enable/disable tickets section in your customer portal.
Tickets on this portal can be submitted by:
You can allow tickets to be raised only by logged-in users or by everyone. CAPTCHA is enabled by default while raising tickets, which lets customers raise tickets without signing in. This ensures that they are not bots and simultaneously saves them time from signing up. You can write to support@freshdesk.com if you want CAPTCHA to be disabled.
Auto suggest solutions while creating a new ticket
Another way to let your customers find answers quickly is by enabling automatic solution suggestions. Based on the keywords entered by your customers when they fill out the new ticket form, Freshdesk will suggest related solution articles on the right side of the form.
Who can view tickets on portal?
You can restrict the visibility of the tickets on the portal by making it available only to logged-in users or make it public so that anyone with the Public Ticket URL can view it. To learn more about the setup and usage of the public ticket URL, click here.
Knowledge Base
You can enable/disable your knowledge base section in your customer portal. Customers can also add feedback to your articles. CAPTCHA is enabled by default while adding feedback, which lets customers raise tickets without signing in. This ensures that they are not bots and simultaneously saves them time from signing up. You can write to support@freshdesk.com if you want CAPTCHA to be disabled.
Who can view solutions?
You can let your customers go through your Knowledge Base articles without logging in. That way, they could find a solution to their problem without raising a ticket. This will save time for both you and your customers.
You can choose to show/hide author's name in your portal by checking the Display author name on this portal box.
If you would like to track agent views on articles in your Knowledge Base Analytics, you can check the Count agent view on articles checkbox. To learn more about Knowledge Base Analytics, click here.
Community Forum
You can enable/disable your forum section in your customer portal.
Note: You would need to enable Forums under Admin > Helpdesk Settings to enable the Forums in your Freshdesk Account
Who can view Forums?
You can let your customers go through your Knowledge Base articles without logging in. Your customers with a platform to interact with each other. This will be useful both from a customer support as well as a branding standpoint.
To avoid spam content in your Community Forums, you can make CAPTCHA compulsory for logged-in users. You can also moderate the content submitted on your Forums. Learn more about Forum Moderation here
You can also preview the settings you have configured for the Customer portal. To access it, click on the Profile picture in the upper-right corner after logging into the helpdesk as an agent, and then click Go to Customer portal.
Note: It is not possible to disable the default portal. However, the custom portal can be disabled or enabled.