CRM-service’s Support Portal
Introduction
This guide provides guidance and remarks concerning the CRM-service’s own support portal. A similar portal for managing the support matters is however available for every CRM-service system, and some parts of this guide will apply also for those. Please contact your reseller to learn more about the Support Portal in general.
An access to the CRM-service’s support portal is granted to certain contact people in a client company. These people can create support tickets in the portal to e.g. ask for help in CRM functions (regarding e.g. reporting or admin settings), to make work orders or to report features that do not seem to work correctly. It is also possible to add attachments, e.g. screenshots, to tickets.
Portal User Profiles
There are two types of users in the support portal: so called normal users and admin users. Users in these two profiles have the following permissions in the portal:
A normal portal user can
- create new tickets and see and update their own tickets,
- see changes on their own tickets made by other users, and
- add comments or attachments to their own tickets.
An admin user can
- create new tickets,
- see and update all the tickets of their own company, and
- add comments or attachments to all the tickets of their own company.
The portal user profile is always defined for each user separately, and it is not directly connected to the permissions in the CRM. For instance, an admin in the CRM is not automatically an admin in the portal, and a normal user in the CRM can have admin permissions in the portal.
Logging in to the Portal
When the credentials for the portal are activated, a password will be emailed to the user. The user name is always the user’s email address.
If the user forgets their password, they can reset the password by clicking the Forgot password? link on the login page of the portal.
Creating a New Support Ticket
The picture above represents an example of the home page in the portal. The users can create new support tickets by clicking the New ticket button at the top left corner of this view.
A new ticket needs a title and description, and you’ll also need to determine a category, severity and priority (see the picture below).
The options for category are Support, Bug and Work Order, and one of these is chosen according to whether the matter is about support, system malfunctioning or a work order. The severity is defined for the Bug category – for Work Orders or Support tickets, the severity must always be “Severity 10 – Not in SLA”. The user can still determine a priority for the Work Orders and Support typed tickets to indicate the urgency from the client company’s point of view.
The user can also add attachments in the Attachment field. These could be e.g. documents or screenshots concerning a work order or support matter.
The ticket is submitted with the Submit button.
Commenting on a Ticket
After submitting a support ticket, the communication about the matter is continued by commenting on the tickets. By commenting, both the client and the CRM support team can discuss the matter, and ask and provide more information. The comments can be read and added in the ticket’s page (see the picture below). While adding a new comment, it is usually necessary to also change the ticket’s status by activating the Change status to checkbox and selecting a status (typically Waiting respond from the CRM-team). The comments are listed so that the newest one is shown on the top.
Adding Attachments
Different kinds of files, e.g. images, can be added as attachments to the ticket. They can be added them when creating the ticket or afterwards on the ticket’s page (see the picture below). Both the client and the CRM support team can add attachments.
Filtering and Sorting the Tickets
It is possible to filter the tickets by their properties. This way you can make the system show only the tickets relevant to the user on the home page, which makes it quicker to find the right ticket.
The filtering can be defined in the Filters section, where the user can choose the status, category, severity and priority values they consider important for them. It is also possible to sort the tickets based on the fields shown, e.g. priority or status.
