Customer Portal
Introduction
The vtiger Customer Portal is an add-on package for vtiger CRM.
You can host the Customer Portal package on your website and offer your customers access to the FAQ database, allow them to create and submit trouble tickets and/or to view their invoices, quotes, products, services, and other documents related to their account.
The Customer Portal does not only show the modules mentioned above, but also displays the custom fields and custom blocks that you may have created for those modules in the vtiger CRM.
The administrator can control the fields, that he wants to show in the Customer Portal. This is done with an extension module in vtiger CRM, called Customer Portal, which will allows you to rearrange the order of the tabs, enable/disable tabs, and select the users whose profile will be used to control the fields that will be shown in the portal.
Login
To obtain the login user name and password, you need to create a contact with a valid Email ID in the vtiger CRM and check the Portal User field in the Customer Portal information block. Before that make sure that you have configured and activated the outgoing e-mail server in vtiger CRM. An e-mail will be sent to the contact (customer) with the login data. You can set the time period you would like to grand portal access for each of your customers (contacts) individually, using the Support Start Date and End Date.
Change Password
You can change the password by loging into the portal first. On the upper right side you will find a link called My Settings. Click on it, and a pop up window will appear, where you can enter your new password.
Using the Customer Portal
Except for knowledge base, account- and contact-management, the customer will find a drop down list with the values All and Mine in each tab.
Selecting "All" will show all the records which belong to the same account the logged in customer belongs to.
The Accounts tab will show the logged in customer's company details. The Contact tab will show a list of customers that belong to the same company(account). Tickets/Quotes/Invoice/Documents tab will show all the records that belong to the logged in customer, his company and the customers of the same company.
Choosing the option 'Mine' will show only the records that are associated with the logged in Customer. The Products/Services tab will show all the Products/Services which are associated with a customer, either directly or through quotes or invoices.
Tickets
You can see all the trouble tickets, that have been generated by the logged in customer as well as his colleagues. The drop down box, as described above, will appear in every tab (module), and you can choose to view your own as well as your colleagues information.
A field labled "Related to" contains the information which customer the trouble ticket belongs to. If the customer would like to see the tickets sorted by status, he can set a filter.
Create New Tickets
You can create a new ticket by clicking on the button labled "New Ticket", which you will find on the Ticket Tab.
In the detail view of the ticket you can post the comments and also add attachments. An e-mail will automatically be sent to the customer, when you post a comment. The attachments will be converted into documents in your vtiger CRM and will be attached to the relevant ticket. They can be viewed in the section "More Information".
Contacts
The contacts tab will display a list view of all contacts belonging to the same account (company) which the customer belongs to.
Accounts
The accounts module tab will display the detail view of the logged in customer's account (company) information.
Products And Services
The products tab will show the products that are directly related to the logged in customer as well as the products that are related to the customer through quotes and invoices. This works the same way for services also.
Clicking on the documents tab will open a list view of documents that are related to the logged in customer. To download the attachment, just click on the file name.
If you click on the title, the detail view of the document will open. The detail view contains some basic information as well as the file information.
Invoice and Quotes
Both these modules are presented in a similar way.
By clicking on "Subject" in the detail view, you can get a copy of the invoice/quotes in PDF format.
Knowledge Base
On the left hand side, you will find the categories, and on the right hand side you will find the FAQ's related to these categories. You have search boxes at the top, to search for the FAQ's, in the categories as well as in the products.
If you click on any of the articles, you will see the question, the corresponding answer and any related documents. A comment field is also available underneath.
Multiple Language Support
vtiger supports multiple languages in the Customer Portal.
Customer Portal Extension Module
A vtiger module is available for this extension, used for the following tasks:
- Enable/disable tabs in Customer Portal.
- Arrange the order of tabs in Customer Portal.
- Show/hide related information in the Customer Portal.
- Select the user, whose Profile will be used to show/hide the fields of the Customer portal.
Basic Settings
In the basic settings page/section of the Customer Portal, you can change the sequence of the tabs you would like to ake available in the Customer Portal, by clicking on the up and down arrows. Here you can also enable/disable the tabs.
Advanced Settings
In Advanced Settings the administrator can configure how much information the customer can see in the portal. If you want to allow customers to see all the records pertaining to their account (company) in the portal, then you should select 'yes'. Otherwise the logged in customer will only see his own records.
On the right hand side you can select those users, whose profile will be used to control the fields, which will show up in Customer Portal. New tickets created in the Portal will be assigned to these users.
In the edit mode you can select the fields you want your customers to see in the Portal.
