Best practices for designing the customer portal

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Every service desk project comes with a preconfigured customer portal that your customers use to interact with your service team. Here are some best practices on how to design an easy-to-use customer portal that will help both your team and your customers work more efficiently. 

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Brand your help center

Customers can use the global help center to search for request types and knowledge base articles across all customer portals they have access to. Brand your help center by:

  • Uploading your company logo and your service desk can automatically generate a matching theme for your customer portals and global Help Center header. 
  • Naming your customer portals and global Help Center, so your customers can easily identify your team's service desk.

 

Brand your customer portals

For each project's customer portal, you can customize the name, welcome message, and logo to let customers know which portal to use to contact a specific team in your organization. Note that the help center name and header appear across all your project's customer portals. 

Check out Configuring the customer portal to learn more.

Help customers find the request types they need

  • Name request types in language that's familiar to your customers, and use keywords they'll recognize. For example, name a request 'Access to a system' instead of 'VPN access'. 
  • Use different icons for different request types, so customers can easily identify request types in the customer portal.
  • Add contextual help (e.g. specify photo dimensions and format for the attachment field) with the Field help field.
  • Use examples in your request type descriptions (e.g. 'If you need a software license such as Microsoft Office, raise a request here'). 
  • Link to existing information that might be helpful for customers in the request type description. For example, if you have already have a list of available Microsoft Office license numbers on your Intranet, simply add a link to the page in the request type description and instruct customers to claim a license from that page without needing to open a request. 

See Setting up request types for more information on naming request types.

Group related request types

If you have a large number of request types, say more than 7, we recommend grouping some of them together to help customers find what they need. Grouped request types appear as tabs in your customer portal. To add groups, select +Add group from the sidebar. While viewing a group, select Add existing request type to add your request types to it.

Groups appear as tabs in your customer portal. You can control the order in which groups appear by dragging and dropping them in Project settings > Request types

See Setting up request types for more information on managing request types and groups.

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If you don't want your customers to use a certain request type, you can remove the request type from all groups, or move it into the hidden from portal group.

Agents can use hidden request types to organize work internally. Note that removing a request type won't affect requests that have already been created. 

Set up a knowledge base

  • After using your service desk for a while, your team will probably have accumulated a large amount of information that can be provided to your customers so that they can solve some problems before even opening requests. At this point, you can consider integrating Confluence's knowledge base capabilities with JIRA Service Desk. 
  • Connect your service desk project to a Confluence space so customers can search for relevant knowledge base articles on the customer portal:  

For information about how to achieve this, see Serving customers with a knowledge base

Last modified on Apr 17, 2018

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