Customer Portals are a great tool to communicate with regular customers and empower them to track and update their jobs. But some organizations may have infrequent repeat or one-time customers. For these customers, you may want them to easily and temporarily access their jobs in the Customer Portal in a super simple way. That’s what you can achieve using the Customer Portal Link option with your Customer Portal.

The Customer Portal Link provides your customers with instant and temporary access to view a specfic job through your Customer Portal.  No setup or password is required by the customer; they simply click the shared URL link and enter their email address, mobile number, or the Job ID to access the job. The Customer Portal Link url is unique to a job and expires when the job is completed, ending the customer’s use of the portal. 

The Customer Portal feature and the Customer Portal Link are both optional additions to your vWork account. You can learn more about Customer Portals in the article What is the Customer Portal?.  Alternatively, email support@vworkapp.com if you want to add the Customer Portal or the Customer Portal Link to your account. One of our team will be in touch to talk through your requirements and help you get up and running.

In this article

This article explains how to enable the Customer Portal Link and set it up to share with your customers. 

Topics covered are:

• How the Customer Portal Link works
• Set up the Customer Portal Link
• Create a job with a Customer Portal Link
• How a Customer views the job in the Customer Portal
• Set an Alert to share a Customer Portal Link

Click a link from the list above to go to that topic. You can return to this topic list by clicking this icon:

How the Customer Portal Link works

Once the Customer Portal Link is enabled in the Customer Portal settings, every time a new job is saved a unique Job-specific URL link to the Customer Portal is saved with the job in the job’s 'Notes' field. You can share this link to the job with your customer using an email or SMS alert, or manually.

Once a customer has the unique URL link to their job they click it to open the Customer Portal login page. They can then easily log in using their one-off login details (email address, mobile number, or the job ID) and view their job.  Their customer portal access to the job remains active until the job is completed.

Set up the Customer Portal Link

Add the Customer Portal Link to vWork

First, make sure the Customer Portal Link is added as an option to vWork. vWork support can do this for you. Send an email to support@vworkapp.com with the subject 'Customer Portal Link - Tokenized Portal' in the subject line and one of our team will be in touch.

Enable Job Notes to include Customer Portal access

After the Customer Portal Link is enabled by vWork support, you enable your account to add the Customer Portal Link to your templated Jobs in the template's Notes field. This is done in the Portal Settings.

1. Go to Settings > Portals > Settings 
   
   
2. Scroll to the 'Job Creation' section and click to add a checkmark to Include portal access as a job note.
   
   
3. Click .

Create a job with a Customer Portal Link

Create jobs based on a template

After you enable job 'Notes' to include the Customer Portal Link in the Portal settings every job created from a template will include a unique URL link to the customer portal in the job Notes. This URL link can be shared with the customer so they can view and, where enabled, edit their job.

It doesn’t matter how a job is created so long as it is based on a job template. The job can be created: 

• manually from the Schedule or Jobs tab, 
• through the API, 
• as a repeating Job, 
• from a CSV Job import.

🔔 Note: Jobs created without using a job template won't include a Customer Portal Link. You can only create jobs without using a template when the Mandatory Job Templates option is disabled in the vWork General settings. We enable this setting as the default and it can only be disabled or enabled by a vWork Admin. We recommend you leave it enabled.

Create a job

To create a job with the Customer Portal Link:

1. Open the job template you want to use to create the job.
   
   
2. Enter the job details and be sure to include the customer’s email address and mobile phone number if you have an alert set up to share the Customer Portal Link with your customer.
   
   
3. Save the job. When you next open the job you will see a link to the Customer Portal in the Notes field.
   
   
   
   
4. Send the link to your customer automatically using an alert (either email or SMS) or manually (copy and paste the link from the job into an email). Make sure you tell them what their login details are to enable them to log in to the portal. This is explained below in the topic How a Customer views the job in the Customer Portal.

Important contact information to save with the job

When a job is created for a new customer (i.e., they have not previously been saved as a customer in vWork), vWork creates a new customer record from the 'Customer Name' and the 'Customer Details' from the job. These are saved to the 'Customer Site Contact' fields in the newly created vWork customer record. 

It is easier to share the Customer Portal Link with the customer by email or SMS if you capture the email and mobile number in the Customer Details when the job is created. This removes the task of entering this information into the vWork customer record at another time, and also makes it simple to ensure alerts work as intended for the job.

How a Customer views the job in the Customer Portal

When the customer receives the Customer Portal Link via email or SMS alert, or if it is sent manually, they must log into the Customer Portal to access the job. They don't need to sign up to the Customer Portal or create a password to do this. All we require is their email address, mobile phone number or the Job ID - depending on what customer information was saved with the job.

To view a job in the Customer Portal using a Customer Portal Link:

1. Click the url link to open a login prompt for the Customer Portal.
   
   
2. Enter one of the following at the login prompt:
   • their email address, or
   • their mobile number, or
   • the Job ID.
   
   🔔 Note: the login option presented to the customer depends on what information is saved with the job. They are presented with an email login field when an email address is saved with the job, even when other contact information is also saved. Where there is no email address they are presented with a mobile phone login field. If an email or mobile phone number aren't saved  they are presented with the Job Id login field.
   
   
3. Click Login.
   
   
   
   
4. The customer is logged into their Job in the Customer Portal as a guest.  Depending on the template and permissions that are set they are able to view and update the job.
   
   

Set an Alert to share a Customer Portal Link

If you want, you can set either an email alert or an SMS alert to automatically share the link with your customer. This makes it easy for you to share the Customer Portal Link with your customer without any extra work required by you - provided you saved an email or SMS number in the 'Customer Details' in the 'Job Information' tab in the job.

Create an email or SMS alert, as you normally would, and then add the Portal Access URL link to the alert message. The process for doing this for both email and SMS alerts is described next, but for more help with creating alerts please see the article: Set up an Alert.

Email alert setup

To create an email alert to send the Customer Portal Link - when setting up the alert:

1. Under Who Should we Notify by Email?
   click the checkbox next to Send to Customer’s Site Contact to select this.
   
   
2. In Customize the Alert Message
   go to the Message area and enter your email message. 
   
   
3. In the body of the Message, put the text cursor in the place where you want to insert the Customer Portal Link URL. 
   
   
   
   
4. From the menu of tokens, under the heading Customer Details, click the Portal Access URL token to add it to the body of the message where you have positioned the text cursor. 
   
   

Email alert example with the Customer Portal Access link

In this example, we used a 'Job Created' alert. The email alert looks like this when sent to the customer. 

SMS alert

💡 Tip: You will need a little bit of help from our support team to create the SMS alert message and add the Customer Portal Link to it. 

To create the SMS alert:

1. Set up your SMS alert. When you reach the section with the title Who Should we Notify by SMS? click to select the checkbox - Send to Customer’s Site Contact.
   
   
2. Email support@vworkapp.com with a request to customize the body of the SMS alert and add the Customer Portal Link. Tell us the name you have used for this Alert in the email message. We will notify you when we have completed this request and your SMS Alert is ready to use.