Why a customer portal matters
Your customers do not want to call to ask where their order is, or email to get a copy of last month's invoice. They want to sign in, find it and get on with their day. Every one of those calls and emails is also time your team spends looking something up and typing a reply.
A customer portal answers those questions without anyone picking up the phone. That is why we call it your best salesperson. It is available at any hour, it knows every order and invoice, and it makes it easy to do business with you again.
What to put in a portal
Status and history
The most common question is some version of "where is my order?" or "when are you coming?". Show the current status of each open job or order, and keep the history below it. History is also a quiet reminder of what the customer has bought from you before.
Invoices and payment
Let customers see their invoices without asking. If you take payments through Stripe in Unstack, a portal page can include a pay button on unpaid invoices.
One thing they can do themselves
Pick one action that needs a phone call today, such as approving an estimate or requesting a service visit. Put that in the portal first.
How the portal works in Unstack
It is part of your app
The portal is not a separate product. Portal pages are pages in your app that are meant for customers instead of your team, and they read from the same live tables your team works in. When someone in the office updates a job, the customer sees the new status the next time they look. There is nothing to export or sync.
Customers have their own sign-in
Portal users are separate from your team. They sign in at your portal address and never see the app your team works in. Each portal user is linked to their customer record, either directly when you invite them or by matching the email address they sign in with.
Each customer sees their own records
Portal pages are built to load only the rows that belong to the signed-in customer, and that check runs on the server. You should still test it yourself before you invite anyone. The setup steps below include that.
Your branding and your domain
The customer portal is included on every plan, including Free. On Starter and above you can also brand it: change the look of the portal and its login screen, and put it on your own domain.
Design principles for a portal people use
Answer a few questions well
Resist the urge to show everything you know about a customer. A portal should answer the three or four questions your customers ask most often, and answer them on the first screen.
Check it on a phone
A customer checking on a job is probably doing it from a phone. Open the portal on yours before you send the first invitation, and ask the builder to fix anything that is hard to read or tap.
Keep the data current
A portal is only as good as the records behind it. If your team does not update job statuses in the app, the portal will show stale information and the phone calls will come back.
Setting up your first portal
- Get your customer data in order. You need a customers table with an email field, and your orders, jobs or invoices need to link to a customer.
- Ask the builder for the pages. In Build mode, describe what you want: "Build a customer portal where a customer can see their open jobs, past jobs and invoices." The builder writes the portal pages and sets up how portal users are matched to customer records.
- Adjust the look. On Starter and above, choose Edit Portal in your portal settings. The portal opens inside the builder, where you can switch between the Login and Portal tabs and describe the changes you want.
- Decide who can get in. Invite customers by email from the portal settings. If you want customers to be able to register themselves, leave Allow new signups on. When it is off, only invited users can access the portal.
- Test as a customer. Create a test customer, invite yourself with a personal email address, sign in and confirm that you see that customer's records and nobody else's.
- Start with a few customers. Invite a small group, ask what is missing, and fix that before you invite everyone.
Start with a working foundation
The goal of a first portal is not to cover everything. It is to take the most common question off your team's plate. You can add pages later, in the same conversation with the builder that created the first one.
Your customers already expect to look things up for themselves. A portal with two useful pages is better than a plan for one with twenty.