Overview

The customer portal is an exclusive online site where your customer contacts on an account can view the shared mutual Plan and track the progress live.

Sharing your plan and progress increases the trust and transparency between you and your customers and reaffirms your commitment towards helping your customers achieve their goals and milestones.

Here are some common use cases where you can increase trust and transparency with your customers by leverage this feature

1. Define your Onboarding Plan including assigning tasks to your contacts. Once your Onboarding Plan is defined you can share this with your customer contacts so they can track the progress of the activities and help them achieve the mutual goals
2. Define an Escalation Plan in times of escalation and share the progress with your customers
3. Document and capture new Initiatives as they arise with your customers and help them achieve them in a clear and transparent fashion

This article contains the following sections

• Preparing to use the Portal
• Sharing the Plan with customer contacts
  • Assigning a co-owner in a SuccessPlay
  • Assigning tasks to contacts
  • Sharing an Account with contacts
  • Including the Portal link in Touchpoints
• Customer Experience using the Portal
  • Customer contact logging into the Portal
  • Customer contact viewing the Plan in the Portal
  • Emails to customer contacts

Preparing to use the customer portal

Turning it on

When you are ready to try out the customer portal the Portal can be turned on in Global Settings > Engagement > Customer Portal > Enable Customer Portal. All the features describe below only appear when this switch is turned on.

Terms and Conditions

If you want your customers who use the Portal to accept your terms and conditions you may choose to add them here so users who sign it are required to accept it for the first time.

Adding your logo

Ensure that your logo is uploaded to Global Settings > My Account. This logo is presented to your customers in the Portal

Sharing the Plan with your customer contacts

Sharing the Account with customer contacts.

Once you are done creating the Plan and are ready to invite your customers you can hit Share on the Plan tab. Once you share the Account, you can optionally send an invitation email inviting them to view the Plan in the Portal.

1. Hit Share on the Plan tab
2. In the Share account modal turn on the switch to share the Account on the portal
3. Decide to send the invitation email to all contacts.
4. Provide a friendly name for this Plan so customers can easily identify the Plan that is shared with them
5. Hit Done
6. The customer can only see the Objectives and the SuccessPlays that were made visible to external contacts. Any one of tasks will also appear in a TODO's bucket.

A customer can view the Objective and any SuccessPlays that were made visible to customers. Customers will also see any one of tasks assigned to them. Customer contacts cannot make any changes to tasks. They can only complete tasks assigned to them.

Here is an example of the email that is sent to customers

Who can share the Plan?

You can control who can share the Plan with customers. A permission Share Account with Contacts has been added to control this. Setting it to "Everyone in Account Assignment" ensures only users who are part of the account team can share the Plan with customers

Assigning a Co-owner in a SuccessPlay

When you are working with multiple stakeholders you can add your customer stakeholder as a Co-Owner to the SuccessPlay to indicate the shared ownership in the execution of Initiative. Also sharing the SuccessPlay lets customer contacts to share this SuccessPlay with your contacts.

1. Edit a SuccessPlay added to an Account or choose one from the SuccessPlay templates
2. Change the Sharing with customer contacts switch on to share this SuccessPlay with contacts in the Portal. Note: The SuccessPlay is not visible in the Portal till the account is shared.
3. The Co-Owner field is displayed for you to choose a customer contact.
4. Save the SuccessPlay and the SuccessPlay is rendered with a green background to visually indicate that this SuccessPlay will be visible when the account is shared in the portal

Assigning Tasks to Contacts

While working with customers you may want them to complete certain items in the Plan to make progress towards those objectives. The system allows you to assign tasks to any of the contacts on the account. Tasks assigned to Contacts appear in the Portal and contacts can make them as complete on the Portal

1. Edit an existing SuccessPlay and add a task
2. Choose a contact as a task assignee 

Including the Portal link in Touchpoints

Besides the initial invitation email while creating a touchpoint, you can decide to include a link to the Portal to make it easy for customers to access it

Customer experience accessing the Portal

Customer contact logging into the Portal

When you invite your customer they will receive an email inviting them to view the Plan in the Portal. Clicking on the link automatically logs them into the portal and the link is active for 2 weeks.

The system provides a helpful walkthrough explaining the various components of the Plan and requesting them to bookmark the site address.

If your customer signs out of the portal they can go to the Portal link and enter their work email. If this email matches the contact email on the account, the system sends them an email link and logs them in. 

Note: There is no need to provision customer accounts or perform additional setup to enable them to login. Just an invite let's customers login to the portal! 

Customer contact viewing the Portal

A customer contact viewing the portal sees the Plan with the content shared. The Plan is presented as a project with Initiatives and tasks. Flows on SuccessPlays or tasks are hidden from the contact since this is specific to Totango.

A customer contact can view tasks and complete tasks assigned to them.

Emails to customer contacts

No emails are sent to customer when tasks are assigned to them. Only invitations to portal are sent on demand by specifically hitting "Invite via email" in the Share flow or including SuccessPlan link in the touchpoint.