The customer portal

Where customers raise and follow their requests, the help articles that answer them, and forms open to people with no account.

Customers reach a helpdesk through the portal, where they raise requests and follow the answers, read help articles and, where a request type allows it, send a form without an account. How a helpdesk project is set up is on Helpdesk.

The customer portal

Customers land on the help centre at https://your-workspace.albaticket.com/portal when they log in, which is the address to give them, and reach it from Requests in the header. It lists the helpdesks open to them and their own requests, with an Open only switch. A helpdesk is open to a customer when they are a member of the project with a role that may create tickets; the default Reporter role suits customers.

The list follows what agents do without a reload: a request that changes status is marked for a moment, and each shows when it last moved as the customer sees it (raised, answered in public, or moved to another status), so an internal note never shows as activity.

Opening a helpdesk shows its request types, grouped as the project's settings arrange them. Picking one shows a form built from the request type's fields and sends the request as a ticket of the request type's ticket type, with the customer as reporter.

Each request has its own page with the details, its status and the conversation: replies agents post as public comments, and a box for the customer to add to it. Internal notes never appear there, and neither do the ticket's history, the time logged on it, its links or the fields only agents see: a customer who follows a link to the ticket's own address is brought to this page. Their notifications keep to the same: a customer watching a request hears of the request raised, public replies, status changes and changes to the fields its request type's form shows, and never of time logged, estimates, links, who it is assigned to or other fields. The page also lists the request's attachments and has Attach files for adding more, once the request has been sent; a customer can delete the ones they added. A file attached to an internal note is not shown to customers. Any other attachment is visible to everyone who can see the request, so keep files meant for staff on an internal note. Members can use the portal too; for them Your requests lists the tickets they reported.

Help articles

Pages of the knowledge base can answer customers before they ask. A page reaches customers when two things are true: its space is opened to customers (Customers read its published pages in the space's settings) and the page itself is marked Published in its editor. Nothing else is ever shown to a customer: not the earlier versions of the page or of its files, nor the comments members leave on it. A link in an article to a page or a ticket they may not see shows only its words.

• Help articles in the portal lists the published pages of the helpdesk project's space and of the workspace spaces opened to customers, with a search. A customer reads the articles of a project's space only where they may raise requests in that project.
• A request form suggests articles that match the summary as it is typed. Opening one shows it over the form, so nothing typed is lost.
• A public request form, which people send with no account, suggests only from spaces an installation administrator has opened to the public (Public request forms suggest its published pages in the space's settings), and never from any other.

Every time somebody opens a suggested article, the form it was opened from is noted, and whether a request was then sent from it. The helpdesk's queues page counts, over the last thirty days, the forms on which an article was opened and how many of them sent no request: the questions the articles answered. A form counts once it has been left for half an hour.

Public request forms

A request type can be opened to people who have no account at all, so that a form on your own website raises a request here. Because such a form takes anything from anyone, opening one, or changing one that is open, needs Publish helpdesk forms as well as Manage helpdesk forms; setting it back to needing an account, or archiving it, needs only the second. Edit a request type and set Who may send this form in:

• People who can log in here — the usual portal form, and what every request type starts as.
• Anyone, with no account — the form answers at its own address, which the dialog shows you. Put that address on your website, or link to it from an email signature.

Whoever fills the form in becomes the reporter of the request, with no password and no sign-up. They are emailed the request's number and a link to it at once; the page itself only thanks them, in the same words whatever happened. Alba Ticket keeps their name and address, and nothing else, until they prove the address is theirs. They cannot log in, and they are not counted as a member of your workspace.

When an agent answers, the person who sent the form is emailed what was said and a link to the request. The link is theirs alone, works for thirty days and is the only way in. It shows the request, its status and the public conversation — never an internal note — updating as agents answer, and lets them answer. Answering is what proves the address, so the first time they do, they become a customer with an account, are given the Reporter role in that project, and find the request in the help centre the next time they log in. If your installation only creates accounts by invitation, or has no role called Reporter to give them, they stay as they are and keep using their link.

A security level that leaves out the request's reporter closes the link. It then answers as an expired link does, saying nothing about the request; a page left open on it goes the same way; an answer through it or by email is refused; and nothing more about the request is emailed to them. Taking the level off opens the link again. To keep a request on a level and the link working, grant the level to the reporter. Once the person has an account, the link shows them what the help centre does, and the help centre never shows a customer a request on a security level.

Only a request raised through a form works this way. People imported from Jira who never had an account here are not emailed about their old tickets, and have no link to them.

An address that already belongs to somebody who can log in here cannot be used on a public form: they are emailed a link to log in with instead, and the form says the same thank-you to everybody, so it never tells a stranger which addresses have accounts. One consequence is worth knowing: a deactivated account still holds its address, so a message from somebody who has left, sent through a public form, does not become a request. Ask them to write to your agents directly, or reactivate the account.

Two things guard the form: a field people never see and automated senders fill in, and limits on how many requests one address, one connection, and the form as a whole may raise in an hour. A form takes only the fields its request type shows: anything else posted to it is ignored, and what the request type presets for a hidden field always wins. Neither uses a third-party service, so a public form loads nothing from other sites. A form's address stops working if its request type is archived or set back to needing an account, which is what to do with a form that starts receiving unwanted requests.