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Logging in and accessing the customer portal

Posted by Nishi on 16 December 2022

By default, when you sign up for a Freshdesk account, your helpdesk is split into two sections:

Agent Portal - This is the Freshdesk agent interface you see when you log in to your account. On the agent portal, you can respond to incoming tickets, add knowledge base articles, check out reports, and so on. If you're an Administrator, you can also manage additional settings, add support reps and pay for your Freshdesk account.
Customer Portal - This is the portal where your customers can register themselves, browse through your Knowledge Base, engage on your Forums, and raise and track their tickets.

If you'd like to learn how your customers can use your support portal, check out Freshdesk's End User guide here.

If you are an Administrator, you can configure your support portal to be exactly the way you want. For example, you could rebrand it to change the way it looks, decide who gets to access it, or even enable Single Sign-On with popular services to make it easy for customers to log in.

How to customize your customer portal

Login to your helpdesk as an Admin.
Go to Admin > Portals > Settings.
A list of options is available that lets you tweak your public customer portal.

User Sign-up and Login

If you want to store the information of the user raising a ticket, you can have new users sign up from your public portal.

You can also let your customers log into Freshdesk with their Google, Twitter, and Facebook credentials. This speeds up the sign-in process for your customers and you also get to keep track of who logs in.

User Permissions for portal

You can choose to allow tickets to be raised only by logged-in users or by everyone. Freshdesk lets you make CAPTCHA compulsory while raising tickets, which lets customers raise tickets without signing in. This ensures that they are not bots and, at the same time, saves them time from signing up.

Another way to let your customers find answers quickly is by enabling automatic solution suggestions. Based on the keywords entered by your customers when they fill out the new ticket form, Freshdesk will suggest related solution articles on the right side of the form.

You can restrict the visibility of the tickets on the portal by making it available only to logged-in users or make it public so that anyone with the Public Ticket URL can view it. To learn more about the setup and usage of the public ticket URL, click here.

You can let them go through your Knowledge Base articles and Community Forums without logging in. That way, they could potentially find a solution to their problem without having to raise a ticket. This will save time for both you and your customers.

For creating new topics, you can choose to make CAPTCHA compulsory for logged-in users as well.

You can also set up an SSO mechanism to validate users trying to log into your portal for Freshdesk using a locally-hosted script. These could be users who already have an account in your web application or whose information you have stored in your internal application like ActiveDirectory (learn how).

You can also preview the settings you have configured for the Customer portal. To access it, click on the Profile picture in the upper-right corner after logging into the helpdesk as an agent, and then click Go to Customer portal.

Note: You can switch back to the Agent portal after reviewing the changes you have made by clicking on this link in the upper-right corner:

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