Portal Helpdesk
The Helpdesk is where tickets raised in the portal land. Customers, suppliers and employees all use the same support screen on their side, and all of their tickets arrive here — filtered by who raised them, so a support desk and an HR team can work the same queue without getting in each other's way.
The list
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Ticket | The reference. |
| Subject | What they wrote. |
| Raised by | The portal user, and which customer, supplier or employee they belong to. |
| Category / Priority | How it was classified. |
| Status | Open, Answered, Resolved or Closed. |
| Last update | When anything last happened on it. |
Filter by Customers, Suppliers or Employees, and by status. Needs attention is the one to work from: open tickets with no answer yet.
Answering a ticket
Open the ticket to see the thread. Two things can be added:
| Action | Who sees it |
|---|---|
| Reply | Shown in the portal thread, and the person who raised it is notified. |
| Internal note | Kept on the ticket and never shown in the portal. |
Internal notes are what let a ticket be handed between people without the customer reading the handover. Use them for anything you would not say to the person's face.
Status
Set status moves the ticket through Open, Answered, Resolved and Closed. Replying does not close a ticket on its own — a question answered is still a question that may come back, and the status is a judgement somebody makes rather than a side effect of typing.
Customer tickets and the CRM
A customer's portal ticket has a helpdesk status of its own. That status is the state of the support request; it is not the customer's CRM sales stage, and moving one does not move the other. Keeping them separate is deliberate: a customer can have an unresolved support ticket and a healthy sales pipeline at the same time.
Employee tickets
Employees raise tickets from their portal in the same way, and they arrive under the Employees filter. In practice these are HR and IT requests rather than support, so it is usually worth setting up categories that reflect that and letting the HR team work that filter.
Every reply notifies the person who raised the ticket, including on their phone if they have the portal app and notifications on — see Portal notifications.