Best practices for designing the Customer Portal
Your Customer Portal is where your customers interact with your service team. Here's some best practices on how to design an easy-to-use Customer Portal that helps both your team and your customers work more efficiently.
- Brand your Customer Portal with your company's color scheme and logo. This is very easy: the color scheme for your service desk will automatically match that of your logo once your logo is uploaded. Wondering how? See Configuring the customer portal.
- Name your request types in your customers' languages, i.e. using the keywords customers will be looking for. For example, 'Access to a system' instead of 'VPN access'.
- Help customers decide which request type to choose. How?
- Use different icons for different request types. This is especially helpful for customers who come back to open the same request types again as the icons stand out for them and they can easily spot the ones they are looking for.
- Give examples and help text, e.g. for 'Software Request', you can add a description of 'If you need a software license, e.g. Microsoft Office, raise a request here.'
- You can also provide links to existing information that might be helpful for customers. For example, if you have already purchased a number of licenses for Microsoft Office and listed the license numbers on your Intranet, you can add a link to the page in the request type description and tell your customers to head straight to it to claim a license without opening a request.
- Keep the list of request types above the fold. If you have a large number of request types, e.g. more than 7, customers will probably need to scroll to get to some of them. In this case, consider grouping some request types together. To set up groups, use the Groups drop-down and type the group names:
- Order the request types and request groups. As the number of requests increases, you might see the trend in the types of requests that get created. You can analyze the trend and tweak the order in which request types are displayed so that the popular ones appear at the top. See Configuring request types and workflows to learn about creating groups.
Groups appear as tabs in the left-hand side of the Customer Portal
- For each field on the request form, add contextual help. Help provided in context makes it easy for your customers to complete the form. For example, specify the dimension and the format of the photo for the attachment field as shown in the screenshot. Add your contextual help with the Field help field.
Last modified on Jun 22, 2015
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