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The customer portal feature allows you to create and manage a mini-website that can help your customers when your support team is offline. It enables you to develop a knowledge base with public and internal (available only for your agents) articles & sections, create forums for customer discussions, and collect feedback and suggestions for improvement from your customers. All articles, forums, feedback, and suggestions can be organized into categories to maintain easy navigation. Each LiveAgent account comes with a built-in customer portal that can be customized as per your needs. Our knowledge base is also built using this feature.
Customers can also use the customer portal to raise tickets for your support team via the "Submit ticket" function. They can also view their tickets history in the "My tickets" section. In addition, customers can initiate a chat with an online support agent while reviewing their tickets using the "Start chat" function.
Each function of the customer portal (Knowledge base, Submit ticket, and Start chat) can be disabled if you do not want to make it available to your customers.
Depending on your LiveAgent plan, you can create additional customer portals on different domains in addition to the default customer portal. For more information, please check this article.
Customer Portal Configuration Overview
To configure and customize your customer portal, navigate to Customer portal > Settings and click on the "Change" button next to the "General Configuration" header. A new window will open where you can modify the appearance of your customer portal, insert custom HTML and CSS code, or add tracking codes and scripts.
General Settings
In the General settings section, you can name your customer portal (to recognize this portal in the list of customer portals if you have multiple portals), set its favicon, logo, and title. You can also use translation marks ## in the title for automatic translation to other languages. More information about custom translations can be found in this article.
The language of the customer portal cannot be chosen by the visitor. It is determined by the preferred language for displaying websites in the visitor's browser, if it is an active language in LiveAgent.
If none of the visitor's preferred languages for displaying websites is active or available in LiveAgent, the portal will be displayed in the default language.
Alternatively, there is also a way to forcibly change the portal language by adjusting the URL with language codes. This allows you to develop a quick language switcher that can be added to the header of your customer portal. For more information, check this article.
Theme Selection
In the Design section, you can select the theme for your customer portal. Each theme can be further customized using custom HTML and CSS code. Each sub-section of the Design section is theme-based, meaning you can have e.g. different custom CSS styles for each theme.
Color Adjustments
In the Design > Colors section, you can customize the colors of various elements of the customer portal and preview your portal. Each theme has different elements, and therefore the available options may vary for each theme. There are also predefined color styles that you can select to quickly change all available colors.
The Montana theme allows you to select the header image or insert a link to your custom image.
Defining Custom HTML Elements
If you'd like to replace the default header, footer, or my tickets menu, you can create your own in the Design > Own HTML section. You can use the variables provided next to each field to display various info in the header, footer, or my tickets menu. You can also use the variables as conditions while utilizing the Smarty language.
If you wish to hide any of the mentioned elements, enter <span></span> into the selected field.
Custom CSS
To modify the design of your customer portal using custom CSS code, navigate to the Design >Custom CSS section.
Adding Custom Tracking Codes
To add custom scripts to your customer portal, go to the Design > Tracking codes section. This option can be helpful if you would like to add your LiveAgent widget (e.g. chat button) to your customer portal or insert a code from a third-party application (e.g. Google Analytics). You can add tracking scripts after the HTML <head> and <body> tags and/or before the </head> and </body> tags.
Ticket Submission Function
The Submit ticket function allows your customers to contact your support team and raise tickets directly from your customer portal.
To set up the submit ticket form, navigate to Customer portal > Settings and click on the "Customize" button next to the "Submit ticket" header. A new window will open where you can adjust the configuration of your submit ticket form and its fields.
In the Overview section of the form's configuration window, you can choose whether to require authentication from a visitor to submit a ticket. If this option is active, only registered and logged-in customers will be able to raise tickets via this function. Additionally, you can select in which department tickets raised via this function will be created.
The Contact form and Fields sections allow you to set up the title, description, and confirmation message of the form, and manage its input fields. Configuring this form is similar to configuring any other contact form, so for more details about the form's and fields' configuration, please refer to this article.
The design of the submit ticket form is automatically set according to the selected theme of the customer portal. When a customer is logged in, the Name and Email fields are hidden as these details are automatically populated.
Viewing Tickets History
In addition to ticket submission, logged-in customers can view all their tickets in the "My tickets" section. They can see their tickets' statuses, attributed public tags, and reply to them directly from the portal. Signup and login are required to access the "My tickets" section.
You can also automatically add a link to the ticket that a customer can open in their browser to access the ticket via the customer portal. This can be achieved by adding the {$conversationLink} variable to your email templates. You can also choose whether authentication would be required to access the link by turning on/off the "My tickets" - "Require authentication" option in Configuration > System > General.
Initiating a Chat from a Ticket
If you do not have a chat button integrated into your customer portal, there is a built-in Start chat function available in each ticket in your customer portal. This allows your customers can follow up on their tickets with an online support agent right away. The chat does not create a new ticket but starts in the ticket from which it is initiated, hence the department is already defined and cannot be set up in the function's configuration or selected by the customer. If there isn't any online agent available for chats in the given department, the built-in Start chat button will not be available.
You can configure the customer portal chat function by going to Customer portal > Settings and clicking on the "Customize" button next to the "Start chat" header. A new window will open where you can select the language of the chat window's elements, set up the title and the welcome message, and adjust the theme and design of the chat window. The configuration of this chat window's design is similar to that of any other chat button, so for more details about the Chat window section configuration, please refer to this article.