A well-designed customer portal improves your customers’ experience when they need to interact with you. And it helps take the load off of your support staff. Whether browsing the knowledge base for answers, asking a question through the builtin contact form, accessing interaction history, or updating contact information, users can do it all with the iService customer portals. iService 8.6 includes enhancements to the builtin customer engagement centers that make this experience even better.
Let’s take a look at some of the improvements to the customer portals in iService 8.6.
Option to Hide Login and Registration in your Customer Portal
The iService customer portals provide your customers the option to collaborate with you on every aspect of their interaction with your organization. For example, they can update mailing list subscriptions, view past interaction history, and control the customer data they provide you.
But in some cases, you might want to limit access to these features that require customer login. For example, maybe you are only using the portal to publish basic support information and capture questions. Or, perhaps you have a separate login that customers use to manage their customer data or order history. In those scenarios, you might need to remove the option for registering or logging into the portal.
This is now supported through a simple configuration option. To suppress the login and sign up links, just add this code to your customization form.
var showLoginRegister = false;
.
Enhancements to the Builtin Contact Form
One of the primary uses of the customer portal is to streamline the process for accepting customer inquiries. While email is often the preferred method for interaction by customers, free form email sent to your support mailbox is very inefficient. Without any structure to the question, it’s common to get questions that are missing basic information.
The builtin Ask a Question form in the customer portal solves many of those issues. The form will automatically request additional information, and can even make fields required before the customer submits their question. This information is not displayed in a user friendly format making it easier for customers to complete, and saving your agents time by getting everything they need to provide a great service experience.
The form also integrates your knowledge base content into the question submission process. This gives your customers a chance for self-service before submitting their question.
Learn more about the customer engagement centers in the iService User Guide.
Improvements to the Customer Information section
Your support portal allows customers to update their contact information and any custom properties you’ve created and designated as customer editable. This makes it easy for customers to ensure you can reach them, and puts them in control of the data they provide you. This section, Update Profile, was redesigned in 8.6 to provide a better user experience.
Other V8.6 Release Highlights
Updates to the External Answer form
In addition to the tabs portal, major improvements were made to the External Answer form that allows you to get help answering questions. The External Answer form is a quick way to answer a specific question, and doesn’t require an iService agent license or login. The form was updated to allow users to send updates without resolving the question. For example, to let the customer know you will be working on their request but it might take some time.
You can now link to the External Answer form from iService Alerts. Alerts are automated actions that help you ensure questions get answered timely. Email notifications for unanswered questions can include a link for each interaction, so recipients can quickly review and answer any unresolved questions.
Delete Interaction Button and Report
Something else that’s worth highlighting in 8.6 is the new Delete Interaction button that permits privileged users to remove interactions from the iService tenant database. Whether you need to remove confidential data, inappropriate content, or malware that slipped through your defenses, this button lets you do it in one click. To monitor the use of this feature, we suggest setting up a subscription to the new Deleted Interactions Report that will deliver a list of deletions to your inbox.
You can read more about the new Delete Interaction button in the iService User Guide.