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Customer Portal

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The Customer Portal is a place for your customers to view all sorts of information about their tickets, communicate back and forth with you, and pay you! The idea is to bring another level of communication to your customers to stay informed about their repairs or work being conducted by your business.

What it Does

Customers can do the following:

  • View existing Tickets or create new Tickets by default
  • View Invoices and pay them if you are using a Payment Integration
  • Approve or decline Estimates
  • View uploaded documents
  • See information about their Assets
  • View past payment amounts

Table of Contents

Configure the Portal
Portal password requirements
How Customers access the Portal
How Users access the Portal
Navigating the Customer Portal
Disable Portal by redirecting to custom URL

Configure the Portal

You can choose the portal color accent. Head to More > Admin > General Preferences, choose the Portal Accent color code, and click Save. See General Settings to learn more.

By default, customers do not need a username or password to access their portal. Just give them one of the ways to access the portal as described in the next section and they can get right in. Note: This is only true for accounts where you have not added any portal users to them.

These customers automatically belong to the Non-Portal User Group, which only allows them to create new tickets by default (unless someone changes the permissions in that portal user permission group).

You can enforce passwords on a case by case basis by adding portal users to selected accounts, or by selecting a group of customers and following the below steps. You can also enforce usernames and passwords for all customers, which we strongly recommend. To do this,

  1. Go to More > Admin > Customers - Preferences.
  2. Click Additional Settings.
  3. Turn on Secure customer portal with password if portal users exist (including unclaimed invites). Note this setting will enforce this for all future portal users you add, even if you don't add them all to start.
  4. For information on additional portal settings, see our Customer Settings article.
  5. Click Save.
  6. Go to Customers.
  7. Select the desired customers using their checkboxes. If you want to select them all, then above the customer names, turn on the Name/Business checkbox as shown below.
  8. In the upper right, click Bulk Actions > Bulk Manage Portal Users.
  9. If you want to select all customers, turn on Apply to all XXX matching search instead if it appears.

     
  10. Click Apply To > Customers and Contacts.
  11. Select the desired Portal Permissions Group.
  12. If you want to enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA), click Require MFA > Yes.
  13. Click Update.

This will send an email to the selected customers with a link to set a password for their portal account.

Portal password requirements

The password requirements for portal users are:

  • Anywhere from 12 to 128 characters in length. It cannot be any shorter—this is a best security practice.
  • Requires at least 1 uppercase letter, 1 lowercase letter, 1 number, and 1 symbol.
  • Cannot equal the customers's email in any way (even if wrapped with spaces or mixed lower and upper case).

How Customers access the portal

There are three ways your customers can access their portal.

Portal link in emails

There is an Online Portal link at the bottom of various emails that they can click to directly sign into their portal.

That line is included in the following default email templates.

  • Credit Card Expired (this one is labeled Online Profile Update Payment Information, and of course if you remove this one, they will not be able to update their expired credit card)
  • Estimate Email
  • Non-Ticket Appointments Email
  • Paid Invoice Email
  • Recurring Charge Failed (this one is labeled Online Profile Update Payment Information, and of course if you remove this one, they will not be able to update their expired credit card)
  • Statement Email
  • Ticket Appointments Email
  • Ticket Autoresponder Email
  • Ticket Comment Email
  • Ticket Created Email
  • Ticket Resolved Email
  • Unpaid Invoice Email

You can go to More > Admin > PDF/Email Templates > Email Templates to edit them and remove that line if you want.

Existing Ticket Lookup

You can embed our Customer Check-In widget right into your website that they can use with their Ticket number and Last name.

Portal URL

You can provide the below RepairShopr Customer Portal login link to customers, where you substitute "yoursubdomain" with your actual subdomain.
https://yoursubdomain.repairshopr.com/my_profile

Important: Customers must use the above URL to login to the Customer Portal, rather than https://yoursubdomain.repairshopr.com/users/sign_in, which is what you and your staff use to access everything else in RepairShopr.

Once they go to that URL, it will open this screen.

If they have are a portal user that requires a password, they can click Or, sign in with password (but following the rest of these steps will result in the same thing). Otherwise, they need to enter their email and click Send Link.

Once they do that, it will send them a "Customer Portal Link Requested" email with a link at the bottom to their portal. The email looks something like this:

Once they click the link, it will take them straight to their portal if they do not have any portal users set up, or it will take them to a username and password screen if they do.

How Users access the Portal

You and your staff can also see a Customer's portal. Just go to their Customer Detail page, then in the Customer Information section, click Customer Online Profile.

However, this only works if the customer account does not have any portal users set up. If it does, the link will take you to https://yoursubdomain.repairshopr.com/my_profile/user_login (which you can also enter directly) and you will have to enter a portal username and password for that account.

Navigating the Customer Portal

After using one of the above methods to get in to their portal, based on their portal user permission group, customers will see an overview of the portal. The below is an example of what a Non-Portal User would see with the default permissions of that group—all they can do is access the portal and create new tickets. You can change the permissions for that group.

 

Let's take a look at a portal user who belongs to the Admin Portal Group—it has every permission enabled. Places below where it says "visible when ___ is turned on" refer to Portal User Permission Group settings.

Top bar and Account Overview
Open Tickets
Ticket Detail
Open Invoices
Invoice Details
Other sections

Top bar and Account Overview

  1. Customer name. After going to another screen, such as clicking View All, click the name to return to this top level portal screen.
  2. Password Reset: Sends a password reset email to the customer's email. Visible when the customer is enabled as a portal user.
  3. Privacy Settings: Opens a Communications Settings page where the customer can set marketing preferences. Visible when Privacy Settings - Manage is turned on.
  4. Sign Out: Logs out the customer and returns to the Sign In screen.
  5. Account Overview: This section is visible when Account Overview - View is turned on.
  6. Shows their Invoice Balance, Prepay Hours Balance, and Store Credit Balance.
  7. Stored Payment Options: Shows their stored credit cards or ACH accounts. Visible when Stored Payment Options - Manage is turned on. Click Manage to add new ones and delete existing ones. Note that the actual credit card or ACH info is stored on your payment gateway's system, not with RepairShopr.
    1. Click to add a new card. After adding it, you can change its nickname and displayed expiration date.
    2. Click the pencil to edit the payment method's nickname. This does not edit the actual card data.
    3. Click X to delete the payment method. If you need to edit an existing method, you will need to delete it and re-add it.

Open Tickets

  1. Section is visible when Tickets - View All or Tickets - View Mine is turned on.
  2. Allows the customer to add a new ticket. Visible when Tickets - Create New is turned on.
  3. View All opens the Your Tickets screen with all items and additional search criteria for that module. Visible when Tickets - View All is turned on. Status is Not and Status is dropdowns are visible when Tickets - Show Status Filters is turned on.
  4. Click a ticket number to view the ticket (see next section). Shopping cart icon indicates ticket was invoiced. Hover over the icon to see the invoice number, and click to view the invoice.

Ticket Detail

When the customer clicks a ticket number, it opens the Ticket Detail screen where they can do the following.

  1. View a downloadable, printable PDF of the ticket.
  2. Click to add a new file attachment to the ticket, whether documents or images, that are relevant to the ticket.
  3. Click an attachment filename to view the attachment.
  4. Enter a new comment in the Message field, then click Add Note to Ticket to add it to the Ticket Comments section below. You can even set notifications in the Notification Center to be alerted when this happens!
  5. A log of all public ticket comments and communication in reverse chronological order. This lets the customer view communication both to and from your business.

Open Invoices

  1. Section is visible when Invoices - View All and/or Invoices - View Mine are turned on.
  2. Opens a Make a payment screen that lists all invoices and lets the customer enter their credit card info or select an existing payment profile if they have one. Customer can also adjust the payment amounts of each invoice. Visible when Invoices - Pay Online is turned on.
  3. View All shows both paid and unpaid invoices, similar to what this section shows, but with searching and payment filtering tools.
  4. Click an invoice number or customer name to open the Invoice Details screen.
  5. Pay Now also opens the Invoice Details screen. Visible when Invoices - Pay Online is turned on.

Invoice Details

  1. Both PDF buttons display a downloadable, printable PDF of the invoice.
  2. If you are using PayPal and Invoices - Pay Online is turned on, this button will allow them to pay their invoice via PayPal.
  3. Likewise, if you are using integrated payment gateway, and Invoices - Pay Online is turned on, this button will allow them to pay their invoice by entering the credit card info.
  4. Click the address to view it in Google Maps.

Note that, as an admin, if you click Customer Online Profile, you will not see the green Pay Now buttons. To get around this, right click that Customer Online Profile link and select Open Link in Incognito Window or Open in InPrivate Window. If you do not see that option, select Copy Link, then open a Private Browsing Window and paste that URL. In either case, then sign in as the customer.

Other sections

The other sections that can appear are similar to the sections listed above. Below are listed the Portal User Permissions needed to display them.

  • Recent Payments: Visible when Payments - View All and/or Payments - View Mine are turned on.
  • Estimates: Visible when Estimates - View All and/or Estimates - View Mine are turned on.
  • Attachments: Visible when Attachments - View Public is turned on.
  • Assets: Visible when Assets - View All and/or Assets - View Mine are turned on.
  • Credentials: Visible when Credentials - View All and/or Credentials - View Mine are turned on and you have added masked credentials to a customer's account.
  • Documentation: Visible when Documentation - View Public is turned on, you have added customer documentation pages, and have set their Page Type to either Customer Portal or All Customer Portals.

Disable Portal by redirecting to custom URL

If you do not want your customers to use the Customer Portal, you can redirect them to a URL of your choosing. To do this,

  1. Go to More > Admin > Customers - Preferences.
  2. Click Additional Settings.
  3. Fill in Disable Customer Portal and redirect to URL (Leave blank to allow access) with a URL that includes either http:// or https://.
  4. Click Save.

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