Self-Service Portal
— What is It?
The main focus of the CRM-service Self-Service Portal is to act as a service platform for the customers. The portal’s users are your own customers – that is, the people who have been saved as contacts in the CRM.
The use of the portal may vary quite a lot, depending on your and your customers’ needs. The portal can for work as a place for training or event registrations and/or sending support requests. You can also bring information to the portal from several CRM modules. The contacts can therefore e.g. see and update information concerning themselves or the their companies. Other information can be displayed in the portal as well. The following modules and their information regarding contacts or accounts are available:
- Contacts and Accounts
- Helpdesk (creating and managing support requests)
- Invitation Events (training and event registrations)
- Invoices (also a function for paying invoices)
- Potentials
- Price Books
- Products and Sales Orders (for a mini web store).
In addition to CRM’s information and functions, you can also have external links to e.g. resources pages or web shops.
For more information about the settings of Self-Service Portal, like active modules, fields and portal profiles, see Portal Settings.
Adding Users to the Portal
The person must be a contact in the CRM so that they can be added as user in the portal. Another condition is, that the contact must have a valid email address – the email address will be the contact’s user name and the password will also be emailed in this address.
You can activate a contact as a portal user on the contact card’s More Information tab, in the Portals section. The following information are determined:
- Active – when the field is active, the contact can access the portal (see the picture below).
- Admin – the contact can edit and add other contacts in their own company (and in the CRM).
- Profile Name – the contact’s portal profile (read more below).
It may not be necessary that all the users see every field or action activated in the portal. Therefore you can create several portal profiles for the users and determine their access to the modules and fields in the portal. With profiles, you can e.g. grant an access to see the company’s invoices and to update the company’s information for the key contact people, while the other contacts in the company will not see this information at all. For more information, see Portal Settings.