How to use Public Portal Websites

Insightly Service allows admins to create their own Public Portal Websites, where their customers can read Knowledge Articles, contribute to the Community forums, and submit Tickets.

How do Public Portal Websites Work?

Community

Portal Management

Portal Settings

Colors & Fonts

Custom Stylesheet

Header and Footer

Portal Pages

How do Public Portal Websites Work?

Self-service is a quick and convenient solution for customers. Your business' knowledge base is vital to providing your customers the best experience possible. 

A Public Portal Website is the multi-lingual, customer service website that Insightly Service generates when your administrators create a Brand. Customize the look and feel of the Portal, including colors and layout, to match your product’s identity.

Your Portal is a resource for your customers where they can educate themselves with Knowledge Articles and share collective knowledge with other users in the Community.

Knowledge Articles

Some customers prefer to help themselves. Knowledge Articles are hosted on your Public Portal Website to be used as a self-service resource for your customers.

Experienced service agents and internal writers can write articles and use them to organize frequently asked questions and product details, then educate customers and agents with that information.  

If they still are having trouble, they can submit a Ticket to your support agents from the Portal.

Tickets

When your customers need to reach you, your customer support agents should be prepared with the best possible tools to quickly solve any issues. Service users can include CC email addresses in the new ticket form on the portal. The CC field is available as an optional field that customers can opt to include in their form. Tickets capture everything from the initial request to all subsequent conversations. Your admins can also select what each visitor has permission to access within the Portal. A visitor’s access to Knowledge Articles, Community Forums, and Tickets can be limited based on if they have registered and logged in as a user on your Portal.

Creating a Portal

To create a Portal, a Brand must be created first.

All Insightly Service accounts will start with a Default Brand and a Default Public Portal Website. Enterprise accounts can support multiple Brands with separate branded Portals.

When creating a Brand, checking the Enable Service Portal checkbox will create a Portal associated with the Brand. Once the subdomain is generated for a Brand, it cannot be updated. To learn more, read How to use Brands.

Admins can find a Portal’s URL in System Settings > Portal Management. The Portal must be enabled for the link to work. 

Languages

Insightly administrators with an Enterprise subscription can add multiple languages to their account in System Settings > Languages Administration to help serve customers by providing support in the language they are most comfortable with.

Community

Community Forums act as a space for your customers to ask questions, collaborate, make product suggestions, and inform other users about issues or bugs. Members of the community can create posts and reply to other posts from other users and agents.

The Community can be enabled or disabled in Portal Settings, which is covered further below.

Insightly provides a Default Community for each Portal. The following Forums are automatically created:

  1. Announcements (Type: Announcements)

  2. Feature Requests (Type: Ideas)

  3. Tips and Tricks (Type: Questions)

  4. Report a Problem (Type: Problems)

Each type of Forum serves a different purpose.

Announcements

Forum where agents can share general announcements. Announcement Forum Posts do not have any voting options. Only agents can create an Announcement Post, but signed-in users can respond in the comments.

Ideas  

Forum where users can share their ideas that would improve their experience with your product. Other users can upvote the ideas and provide their own commentary. 

Agents should be encouraged to share progress on the ideas customers have submitted. Agents can tag the Post as 'Planned', 'Completed', or 'Not Planned'.

Questions  

Forum where users can ask questions and get answers. Other users can upvote these Posts to indicate that they are also interested in finding the answer to the question. Agents should monitor these Forums and provide solutions if possible. If a comment within the post answers the question, an agent can mark the comment as the answer.

Problems 

Forum where users can share problems or bugs. Other users can upvote these Posts to indicate that they are also experiencing this issue. 

Portal Management

Once a Portal has been created, it can be configured and customized in Portal Management. 

  1. Go to System Settings > Portal Management.

  2. Click the hyperlinked name of a Portal.

Here, you will find five sections for personalizing the Portal:

  • Portal Settings

  • Colors & Fonts

  • Custom Stylesheet

  • Header and Footer

  • Portal Pages

Portal Settings

The Portal Settings page will allow you to configure the Portal’s general permissions and identifying features.

  1. Portal Settings
    • Enter your Portal Name
    • Enter an optional Custom Portal URL 
      This requires assistance from your domain administrator
      1. Within your DNS Zone file, create a CNAME record to point your <Custom Portal URL> to serviceportal.insightlyservice.com. The portal link can be located below the Custom Portal URL field in the Portal Settings of Insightly Service.
      2. Next, create a TXT record that points the inskey.<Custom Portal Address>.insightlyservice.com to the portal link provided by Insightly Service
  2. Portal Categories

    1. Knowledge Categories - Click the textbox and enter the names of the Knowledge Article Categories that you wish to appear to your site visitors. 
      Click Add All to add all available Categories, click the X icon next to a Category’s name to remove it, and click Clear to remove all Categories.

    2. Forum Categories - Click the textbox and enter the names of the Forum Categories that you wish to appear to your site visitors.
      Click Add All to add all available Categories, click the X icon next to a Category’s name to remove it, and click Clear to remove all Categories.

  3. Portal Navigation and Branding

    1. Header Logo URL - Enter the URL that visitors will be directed to after they’ve clicked the header logo.

    2. Helpdesk Phone - Enter the phone number to your customer support team.

    3. Logo - Upload an image of your product’s logo.

    4. Favicon - Upload an image to be used as a website icon.

  4. User Signup and Login

    1. Allow users to Sign Up from the customer portal - Select Yes or No.
    2. Allow users to Sign in using - Check the box next to each sign-in option you want to support: Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.

    3. Who can Signup and Login to this portal? - Select Everyone or Only users from allowed domains.

      1. Use the textbox to enter a domain that should be allowed for signing up and logging in. Press enter on your keyboard to add it to the allowed domains list.

      2. If a visitor attempts to signup using an unsupported domain, they will receive an error message:
        Error: This portal is restricted to users from allowed domains only.

  5. User Permission

    1. Who can submit new tickets on portal - Select Logged In Users or Everyone.

    2. Enable CAPTCHA to help avoid spam - Check the box to enable.

    3. Auto-suggest knowledge articles during ticket creation - Check the box to enable.

    4. Who can view tickets on portal - Select Logged In Users or Anyone with public ticket URL.

    5. Allow users to view only portal specific tickets - Check the box to enable.

    6. Who can view knowledge articles - Select Logged In Users or Everyone.

    7. Track article views - Check the box to enable.

    8. Who can view community posts - Select Logged In Users, Everyone, or Disable Community.

    9. Logged in users should enter CAPTCHA to create post - Check the box to enable.

    10. reCAPTCHA Public Key - The Portal’s reCAPTCHA Public key.

    11. reCAPTCHA Private Key - The Portal’s reCAPTCHA Private key.

  6. Community Moderation

    1. Moderate all posts and replies containing links or spam content - Insightly will check all posts and replies for third-party links and other spam activity.

    2. Moderate all posts and replies - Approve every post that gets created in your community.

    3. Do Not Moderate

  7. When finished, click Save Portal Settings.

Colors & Fonts

From the Colors & Fonts page, select the fonts to be used across the Portal. Additionally, clicking the square icons will open RGB color pickers that can be used to customize the colors of various assets.

You can adjust the color of the following assets:

Background Color

  • Body Background

  • Header Background

  • Footer Background

Tab Colors

  • Active Color

  • Inactive Color

Fonts

  • Base Font

  • Base Color

  • Heading Font

  • Heading Color

Link color

  • Link Text

Form Elements

  • Input Focus Glow

  • Primary Button

  • Secondary Button

Custom Stylesheet

The Portal can be configured with a Custom Stylesheet to add or overwrite default theme styles with your own custom CSS.

The Header, Footer, and Document Head Element can be customized using your own custom coding.

Portal Pages

Each of the pages in your Portal has a template that can be edited by admins with coding experience. This is helpful for users who want their Knowledge Base to more closely resemble their own branding.

The signup and login templates are the only templates that cannot be altered.

After making edits, click Save Template & Publish. Click Reset to Default to reset the template at any time.

The following pages can be customized:

General Pages

  • Portal Home

  • Search Results

Knowledge Pages

  • Knowledge Home

  • Category List

  • Folder List

  • Article Details

Community Pages

  • Community Home

  • Category List

  • Forum List

  • Post Details

  • New Post

Ticket Pages

  • Ticket List

  • Ticket Details

  • New Ticket

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