Channels
Open a help centre and customer portal for your customers
Publish your public articles as your own help-centre website, then let your customers sign in there with a one-time code to follow their requests.
Steps
Know what it is
Help centre in the console is your own public help centre for your customers: Your published public knowledge articles as a website on your own host, one site per brand, with search, a sitemap and an optional contact form. It is not this documentation. The Customer portal sits on the same host: your customers sign in and see their own requests, conversations and callbacks. Both are set up by an administrator.
Write and publish public articles
On Knowledge, write each article with New article, set Visibility to Public and choose Publish. Only articles that are public and published show on the site; drafts and Internal articles never do. Changing an article to internal hides it at once; edits show only after you publish again.
Add a site
Open Help centre. Under Add a site, enter the Site title and Your host name, for example
help.example.com, and choose Add site. If the form also offers Or a name on the platform's domain, you can take a name there instead: that site is live at once, with no DNS step.Publish the DNS records and verify
A site on your own host shows as waiting for its DNS record. At your DNS host, publish the TXT record the card shows, and point the host at the platform with a CNAME record to the host name you sign in to the console at. Then choose Verify. Once verified the site shows as live, gets a certificate and Open the site appears.
Shape the site
On the site's card, set the Site title, the Introduction, the Main colour and the Highlight colour. In Languages to show (comma-separated, such as en, de; empty shows all), list the article languages the site shows. Tick Site on to publish it.
Take messages from the site
Tick Show the contact form and choose a Queue for contact messages. Each message becomes a task in that queue, so pick a queue that takes tasks; a queue marked (takes no tasks) does not. Choose Save site.
Switch on the customer portal
Below the sites, under Customer portal, each site has its own settings. Tick Portal on, and choose Codes by e-mail, Codes by SMS or both, then choose Save. If neither is ticked, codes go by e-mail. Open the portal opens the portal's sign-in page on that host.
Let customers open new requests
Customers can open a new request in the portal only when the site has a Queue for contact messages. Until then the panel shows: Choose a contact queue above so customers can open new requests.
Know what your customers do
A customer enters the e-mail address or mobile number they use with you and receives a six-digit code, valid for 10 minutes. Signed in, they see their requests and conversations, reply, attach files, see booked callbacks and download a copy of their data. A customer who uses an address you do not know gets the same screen, and nothing is sent.
Answer from the workspace
A portal reply arrives in Workspace as a customer message on the same conversation and reopens it; your agent answers there as usual and the customer sees the answer in the portal. A new request arrives as a task on the site's queue.
Watch the activity
Recent activity lists the latest portal events, such as Sign-in code requested, Customer signed in, Wrong sign-in code, Customer replied, New request opened, File uploaded and Data export downloaded.
Good to know
- The customer portal panel shows only when the customer portal is on for your account on Feature access. If it says Add a help-centre site first., add a site above it.
- Codes by SMS are charged at your rate card and paid from your wallet; codes by e-mail are not charged.
- A code expires after 10 minutes and stops working after five wrong tries. A session lasts 24 hours.
- Limits per customer: 5 sign-in attempts an hour and 10 codes a day per address, 30 replies, 5 new requests and 20 files an hour, and 3 data exports a day. Past a limit the portal asks the customer to wait.
- Files can be up to 10 MB. Every file is checked for viruses before it is stored; an infected file or a type that is not allowed is refused.
- A customer sees only their own contact record and any records merged into it. Internal notes, whispers and system messages are never shown. A closed conversation cannot take replies.
- The data export leaves out your staff notes. For a full copy of a customer's data, use your data protection request process: see Data protection.
- The portal and the help-centre pages are in English.
- With the help centre switched off on Feature access, the Help centre and Knowledge pages are hidden. Only a role that manages the help centre (an account administrator, or a custom role with that right) sees the page.
Still stuck?
Write to hello@ringura.com, or use the contact page, and say which guide you were following.