A vWork-hosted Customer Portal is a branded self-service website tailored for your business that enables your customers to create and track their own jobs in vWork with ease.

The Customer Portal improves your customer experience and streamlines the process for creating, scheduling and dispatching jobs making these processes faster and simpler for your office team. Available 24/7, even when your office is closed, your customers always have access to their job status and progress updates.

With a vWork hosted Customer Portal, your business runs smoother and your customers stay informed.

The Customer Portal is an optional feature in vWork. To find out more or discuss your needs with one of the vWork team please send us an email at support@vworkapp.com. We'll be in touch to discuss your requirements.

Access options: public, private or temporary

You can make your Customer Portal public, so anyone can sign up to use your services, or private and grant access to Portal Users that you select. You even have the option to provide Customers with temporary access to the Customer Portal to track a job until it is completed.

Flexibility for Customer Portal Users

You have control over what Portal Users can see and do through your Customer Portal. You can choose to enable Portal Users to:

Request new jobs and choose from a selection of different jobs
View live job status information
See their jobs on the portal map and track your driver or worker
Edit or delete a job
Set up job alerts for job Scheduled, Started, and Completed jobs
View and print invoices
Create and view jobs for any customer saved in vWork that is linked to their Portal User profile.

Customize individual Portal User permissions

You can customize Portal User permissions and access to job templates in the Customer Portal for each individual Portal User, overriding the default settings applied to all Portal Users. This allows you to tailor the Customer Portal to meet the unique needs of every customer.

Customer Portal Users and their relationship to Customers in vWork

In vWork we have two different profiles used to enable job creation and tracking for Customers. These are 'Customers' and 'Portal Users'. A customer needs both of these profiles to use the Customer Portal.

A Portal User often has the same name as a Customer saved in vWork and shares the same contact information but this is not necessary. Portal Users and Customers are linked in the Portal Settings to enable Portal Users to manage jobs for Customers through the Customer Portal.

Customers

Customers’ details are viewed and managed through the Customers page in vWork.
Customers have jobs created for them in vWork.

Portal Users

Portal Users have a profile in the Portal Users page in the Portal Settings.
Portal Users self-serve through the Customer Portal to perform some of the functions of a dispatcher. Depending on their Portal User Permissions they can create jobs, edit jobs, delete jobs and track jobs in vWork through the Customer Portal. They can't give a job a start-time (only a dispatcher can do this) but they maybe able to request a preferred start-time.
Portal Users have their Portal User profile linked to a Customer in vWork to self-manage jobs for
that Customer.

Next steps

Follow these steps to get your Customer Portal up and running. We have help articles to guide you through each of these steps. They are linked in the Related articles topic below.

Customer Portal option: Make sure you have the Customer Portal option activated in vWork. Our support team can help with that. Email support@vworkapp.com to talk through your requirements.
Plan: Before you begin setting your Customer Portal permissions it’s a good idea to figure out exactly what you want Portal Users to be able to see and do in your Customer Portal.
Set up the Customer Portal default settings and permissions: Once you have completed your planning you can set up the Customer Portal with the default settings and user permissions, portal access, and job templates that you want to use.
Add Portal Users and customize their permissions: The final stage of setting up your Customer Portal is to add Portal Users, review their individual Portal User permissions and tweak these to meet your needs and the needs of specific Portal Users.

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To learn more about planning and setting up your customer portal, please take a look at these articles:

Plan your Customer Portal: this helps you plan how you want your Customer Portal to work, what jobs you want customers to access, how you want to give customers access, and how you want Portal Users to manage jobs through it.
Set up the Customer Portal: this article explains how to set the defaults and user user permissions, enable public or private access and add job templates.
Sign up and activate a Portal User, guides you through creating and activating Portal Users so they can use your Customer Portal. You are shown both the Portal User and the vWork Admin views of this process.
Customize Portal User permissions and template access, explains how to manage Portal User links to Customers in vWork and the templates a Portal User has access to in the Customer Portal.

To learn more about how to use the Customer Portal as a Portal User, please take a look at these articles:

Using the Customer Portal: provides an overview of the main activities a Portal User can do through the Customer Portal. This links to other articles that provide more detailed instructions for each of these activities.
Create and view a Job in the Customer Portal: describes what a Portal User can see and do in the in Customer Portal ‘Jobs' tab.
Using the Map in the Customer Portal: explains how a Portal User can use the Map tab to view their jobs.
Set up a Job Alert in the Customer Portal: explains how a Portal User can set up a Job Alert to be notified of progress on their job by email or sms.