A vWork-hosted Customer Portal is a branded self-service website tailored for your business that enables your customers to book and track their own jobs in vWork with ease.
The Customer Portal is an optional feature in vWork. You can get an overview of what it is in the article, What is the Customer Portal? To find out more or discuss your needs with one of the vWork team please email us at support@vworkapp.com. We'll be in touch to discuss your requirements.
In this article
This article guides you through the process of configuring the Customer Portal settings. You should read this after planning your Customer Portal. We have an article that helps you with the planning process, Planning your Customer Portal. Have a read of this before you work your way through the configuration steps we provide in this article.
Topics include:
- Enable the Customer Portal
- Configure the Default Settings and User Permissions
- Make your Customer Portal public or private and set up access to it
- Add job templates to your Customer Portal
- Edit the job template permissions for the Customer Portal
- Next steps
- Related articles
Click a topic from the list above to go to that topic. You can return to this list by clicking this icon:
You enable and configure the Customer Portal in the Portal Settings.
To enable the Customer Portal:
- Go to Settings > Portal > Settings
- Under the ‘Default Settings’ heading, click to add a checkmark in the Enable Customer Portal checkbox.
💡 Tip: You can save your Customer Portal settings at any time while you are configuring your portal by clicking .
Configure the Default Settings and the Default User Permissions
Configure the Default Settings
The ‘Default Settings’ apply to all Portal Users. These can’t be overridden for an individual Portal User. These enable the features that are available to Portal Users in the Customer Portal, such as the Map and job alerts.
To configure the ‘Default Settings’:
- Click to add a checkmark next to each default setting that you want to enable. Refer to the article, Plan your Customer Portal, to determine which of these you should enable.
Configure the Default User Permissions
Default User Permissions apply to all Portal Users, but these can be overridden for individual Portal Users in the Portal User settings. The Default User Permissions configure how Portal Users interact with jobs in the Customer Portal.
You must have some Default Permissions enabled to allow Portal Users to access the Customer Portal. The minimum requirement is to enable Portal Users to create jobs or see the status of jobs they have created, or the dispatcher has created.
To configure the ‘Default User Permissions’:
- Click to add a checkmark next to each default permission that you want to enable. Refer to the article, Plan your Customer Portal, to determine which of these you should enable.
Make your Customer Portal public or private and set up access to it
Public or private
In the Customer Portal Settings you have the option to make access to your Customer Portal public or private. The default has the Public option enabled; you must disable this setting to make the Customer Portal private. Please read the article, Plan your Customer Portal, to find out more about what it means to make your Customer Portal public or private.
Review the ‘Enable Public Portal’ setting
To make your Customer Portal available for the public to access, the Enable Public Portal option must be enabled in the Portal Settings. When this setting is disabled the Customer Portal is private.
To review the Enable Public Portal setting:
- Go to Settings > Portal > Settings and scroll to the section heading 'Public Customer Portal'.
This is what you will see in the Portal Settings on first opening the Portal Settings. The Portal is enabled for public viewing.
💡 Tip: The Customer Portal doesn't become visible until your create a Customer Portal Domain URL in the Portal Settings.
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The Enable Public Portal checkbox has a checkmark when it is enabled as a public portal. Click to add or remove the checkmark.
The default setting displays the checkmark and is sets the Customer Portal as publicly enabled.When the checkmark is removed the Customer Portal is private.
This is what the top section of the Public Customer Portal settings look like if you set your Customer Portal to be private by removing the checkmark. This will also remove the option to add a public portal button to your website.
Add the Customer Portal Domain Name
For your Customer Portal to be accessible you must create a Domain Name. You only need to supply the front portion of the Domain Name that identifies your customer portal - we provide the rest to create a unique URL for it.
To add your domain name, in the Public Customer Portal settings:
- Click in the Domain Name field and type a domain name.
- The Domain Name must be one word with no spaces
- We add '.vwork.io' as the extension to your domain name entry to complete the URL.
💡 Tip: If your Customer Portal is enabled as public, after you add a Domain Name and click it becomes accessible to anyone. You can disable the public view while you set up the rest of the Customer Portal to prevent Portal Users from signing up before you are ready for them. It is easy to change between the public or private portal access while you are setting up and testing your Customer Portal.
Add an Introduction
The Introduction shows in the banner of your Customer Portal. You can use the default ‘Introduction’ copy that we provide, or enter your own introduction copy.
To change the default ‘Introduction’ copy:
- Click in the ‘Introduction’ field.
- Select the existing text and delete this, then type your own copy.
💡 Tip: Make sure you check for spelling mistakes and other errors. You can add line returns to make clear space, but don’t make your introduction too long as this reduces the usable space below the banner that Portal Users have to create and view their jobs.
- At this point you can optionally choose to click
to save your Customer Portal settings, and then click
to see what the Customer Portal looks like. You haven't yet finalized the Customer Portal settings so this is just a preview.
Add a Customer Portal link button to your website
If you have chosen to make your Customer Portal public, you may like to add a button to your website to make it easy for customers to find it and sign up.
We have created code that you can use to add a button to your website that links to your Customer Portal.
To add a Customer Portal link button to your website:
- Copy and paste the HTML code into the HTML code for your website where you want the button added.
💡 Tip: You can change the label on the button by changing the words in the code highlighted in the yellow box. Make sure you keep the "quotation marks" either side of the button label.
Required information from your Portal Users when they sign up
When a Portal User signs up to use the Customer Portal, we already capture:
- First name
- Last name
- Mobile
- Password
If you also want to capture a Phone (landline) or Address as required information then please add a checkmark to these options to enable them.
Add job templates to your Customer Portal
The job templates you add to theCustomer Portal are the jobs that your Portal Users are able to select from to create jobs.
To add Job templates you:
- Add the Job template
- Edit the template permissions to determine what Portal users will see for the job and the information they are able to add when they create it.
Add a template
To add a job template, in the Portal Settings:
- In the Portal Settings go to the ‘Default Template’ section.
- Click the template dropdown list to show a list of Job templates saved in vWork, then click to select the template you want to add to the Customer Portal.
- With the template you want to add showing in the template dropdown field, click
.
- The template is added beneath the template drop-down list and a pop-up page opens. This is where you edit the template permissions to adjust what Portal Users can see and the information they are able to add to a job when they create it through the Customer Portal.
- At this point you can change the template permissions (see the next topic), or cancel out of the pop-up and click
to save the templates into the Customer Portal settings.
Remove a job template from the Customer Portal
To remove job templates from the Customer Portal:
- Open the Portal Settings.
- In the ‘Default Templates’ section, click
next to the job template that you want removd from the Customer Portal.
Edit the job template permissions for the Customer Portal
After a template is added to the Customer Portal in the Portal Settings you can edit the permissions that change what Portal Users can see and do with a job when they create it through the Customer Portal.
To edit the the template permissions:
- Go to the template that you want and click
to open the pop-up page where you can edit the template permissions.
💡 Tip: This page opens automatically when you add a template to the customer portal (see the topic above).
- In the template permissions pop-up page, select the permissions you want to apply to each job step and custom field. You can choose from the following options:
- Hidden: The step or field is not visible to the Portal User. This is the default setting for all steps and custom fields.
- Required: The Portal User must enter information in required fields. This will be a step address for a step and whatever value is normally used in a custom field.
- Optional: The Portal user is not required to enter information in optional fields but can do this to supplement other job information if this is needed.
-
Read only: Read only fields are visible to the Portal User to provide them with information but they can’t add or change information in these fields.
In this example, we make the step address, ‘Installation address’, Required because we want Portal Users to add a step address to this field so we will know where to complete the installation for this job.
- When you have updated all the template permissions, click
to save them.
- Add all the templates that you want to use in the Customer Portal and update their template permissions, then click
to save the templates in the Customer Portal settings.
💡 Tip: You can customize the User Permissions and Templates for individual Portal Users to override these defaults after you have finished setting up the Customer Portal. We explain this in the article, Customize Portal User permissions and template access.
Next steps
Test your Customer Portal
Your customer Portal is now able to be used.
At this time you can click to open the Customer Portal and test it. We recommend you set up a trial Portal User and see how they experience the Customer Portal before sharing your Customer Portal with your customers. This gives you the opportunity to tweak your Customer Portal default settings, user permissions and templates to ensure you provide the best experience to your Portal users and ensure they can provide you with the information you want when they create jobs.
Managing Portal Users
Once you know how the Customer Portal looks and feels with the default settings you can learn how to manage your Portal Users and customize their individual settings. We explain how to set up Portal Users in teh article, Sign up and activate a Portal User, and how to do customize Portal User permissions in the article, Customize Portal User permissions and template access.
Related articles
To learn more about planning and setting up your customer portal, please take a look at these articles:
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What is the Customer Portal? provides an overview of what the Customer Portal can do.
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Plan your Customer Portal: this article 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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.