Customer Portal

Natalie,

Our portal is great for situations where your customers:

 1. Want to search for solutions in a knowledge base

 2. Want to report an issue with your company, product or service

 3. Want to collaborate on an issue with your customer service or support team

With configuration, you can setup case deflection, change colors of nav bars and buttons and adjust screen layouts.

With customization, you can drastically change the portal look and feel, integrate custom modules/processes and create unique self-service experiences.  

Portal user access is generally controlled and licensed at the contact level, but check with your customer success manager first as they can identify portal user entitlements and limits.  

From a product roadmap perspective, we are investing in portal improvements over the next few quarters and would love to understand more about your use case.  Based on your use case, I can give you some additional guidance and best practices.  

I'll ask your CSM to reach out and setup a meeting - in the meantime, check out the links below:

Portal user experience (your customers): https://support.sugarcrm.com/Documentation/Sugar_Versions/10.2/Serve/Portal_User_Guide/

How the Sugar users interact with the portal users and the portal itself (your Sugar users): https://support.sugarcrm.com/Documentation/Sugar_Versions/10.0/Serve/Portal_Deployment_User_Guide/

Portal and theme configuration: https://support.sugarcrm.com/Documentation/Sugar_Versions/10.2/Serve/Administration_Guide/Developer_Tools/Sugar_Portal/

Cheers,

Charles Hicks

GM, Customer Service 

Hello Natalie Girmscheid

Sugar Portal is a powerful tool to provide client support and improve CX.

If you would like both to get the most from Customer Portal and generate great CX, I would recommend the following:

• Develop cases' classification according to your business's specific (errors, ideas, consultations, etc.) to help clients categorize a request. It helps you to automate cases processing by SugarBPM. But this list shouldn't have more than 7-8 positions. Long dropdown often leads to incorrect selection. If you need to use more than 8, think about using two linked dropdowns to be more efficient.
• Use hard restrictions on data save, as little as it is possible. Very often, users can't fulfill all data by objective reason, and in this case, a hard restriction leads to bad CX. You will need to find a balance between restrictions and the possibility of saving some fields empty that are important to your internal processes.
• Allow a client to classify the urgency of their request and use this data in combination with SLA conditions for a particular client.
• Configure process definitions for each type of case to automate follow-up emails and further users or automated actions. If you do not use hard restriction on data save, you should be ready to manage cases with the absence of important fields, and it will make more complex your processes, but it's a low price for great CX. :)

If you would like additional functionality of Customer Portal outside of case management and knowledge base searching, this also possible but requires custom development. Sugar is a very flexible platform, and you can implement any of your ideas.  

I hope this helps you.

Regards,
Mykola