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
- 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
- Define an Escalation Plan in times of escalation and share the progress with your customers
- 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
- Customer Experience using the Portal
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.
- Hit Share on the Plan tab
- In the Share account modal turn on the switch to share the Account on the portal
- Decide to send the invitation email to all contacts.
- Provide a friendly name for this Plan so customers can easily identify the Plan that is shared with them
- Hit Done
- 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.
- Edit a SuccessPlay added to an Account or choose one from the SuccessPlay templates
- 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.
- The Co-Owner field is displayed for you to choose a customer contact.
- 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
- Edit an existing SuccessPlay and add a task
- 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.
Comments
2 comments
In the article above it states 'Clicking on the link automatically logs them into the portal and the link is active for 2 weeks' however in the screenshot directly below that and in the product itself it states that the link is active for just 2 hours. It would create a terribly poor experience for the customer if the link was only active for 2 hours as they'd need to go through the process of generating that link every time they want to revisit the objectives and tasks in the success plan.
Hi Simon,
Thank you for your comment. Once a user is logged in the session is active for 2 weeks. So the Invitation email that is sent to a customer contact when the account is shared is valid for 2 weeks.
However subsequently once a user visits the portal link to login a temporary password is emailed to the user and this email (with the password) is valid for 2 hours. Customer contacts receive this when they enter their email address in the login page.
We eliminated the need to remember another password. Hope this helps.
Cheers
Vijay
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