Beetil

In today’s increasingly electronic world, customers expect demand self service capabilities, and they demand excellent customer service. As a result, the need to seamlessly interface with your customers is becoming an increasingly important requirement when considering service management platforms.

Beetil duly obliges with its customer portal.

Think of the Beetil customer portal as a even more lightweight version of Beetil, but one that primarily focuses upon incident management, knowledge sharing and collaboration. Our key driver behind the Beetil customer portal is that:

• Customers should not need to know ITIL
• Customers should not need ANY training whatsoever
• Customers find it easy and painless

Setting up the Customer Portal

Your customers can access the Beetil customer portal at https://youraccountname.beetil.com/portal

If you are an administrator, you can alter your customer portal settings by clicking the customer portal section in the admin section.

You can modify your appearance settings, including setting the background colour of the customer portal, and also the logo to appear in the top right hand corner.

You can also choose what types of incidents you want users to create in the customer portal, and what incident type they will map to.

i.e. in this case, customer portal users would be able to log issues, requests, questions and suggestions, which would be mapped to the incident types of bug, service request, query and feedback respectively.

When a customer logs an incident they would see the following view:

The Customer Portal and Permission Settings

For a customer to be able to see the customer portal, they first need to be permissioned, and then be assigned access to the relevant Beetil services.

If the customer belongs to a company, the services they can potentially have access to are restricted to the services that their company is allowed to see.

In the example above:

• Customer A does not belong to a company, and is permissioned to see service A
• Customer B does not belong to a company, and is permissioned to see services B and C
• Customer C does not belong to a company, and is permissioned to see service C
• Customer D belongs to company A, which has access to services D and E. Therefore this customer could be permissioned to see services D, E, or both.
• Customers E and F belongs to company B, which has access to services F, G and H. Therefore these customers could be permissioned to see any combination of services F, G and H.
• Customers G and H belongs to company C, which has also access to services F, G and H. Therefore these customers could be permissioned to see any combination of services F, G and H.

It is important to note that customers E and F would never be able to see incidents logged by customers G and H – this is because the customers belong to different companies – even though they have access to the same services.

The same theory applies to customers B and C. Even though they both have access to service C, they would not be able to see each others respective indicents.

Setting up Customers
Customers can be easily managed in the customers section of the admin section. To add a new customer simply select “create a new customer”, or to manage an existing customer click on a customer.

Most of the customer fields are self explanatory. Key fields to note are:

• Customer can access customer portal – check this box if you wish the customer to have access to the customer portal. You’ll need to enter a password and confirmation at this stage too.
• Customer is a company admin – if you check this box then this customer will have the ability to add their own company users to the customer portal themselves.
• Customer can see all of their company’s incidents – checking this box will give customers of that company the ability to see incidents logged by other customers in that company.
• Send customer welcome email – checking this box and saving will send the customer a “welcome to the customer portal” email.
• Can log incidents for services – check the services that this customer is allowed to see. If the customer belongs to a company then this list is automatically filtered down to those services that the company is allowed to see.

Customers and Incidents

As a Beetil user, when you log an incident and you assign a customer against the incident, if they have access to the customer portal, you can choose whether or not you wish them to access this incident. You will see a “show incident in customer portal” next to their customer name.

Also – when saving, if the customer has access to the customer portal, then there is an optional checkbox to be able to send the customer a notification email that the incident has been updated.

Whenever customers log or update incidents themselves, the current incident assignee (or default assignee if a new incident) will receive an email notification.

There’s more coming soon!
The Beetil customer portal currently focuses mainly on incident management, but coming very soon we’ll have a knowledge management and message board/forums component.

More links in our getting started with Beetil series

• Setting up and configuring services
• Incident Management
• Problem Management
• Change Management
• Release Management (coming soon)
• Configuration Management

Remember you can always access the help link in the top right hand corner of most pages! And you can always contact us on email at support@beetil.com, or catch us around the Campfire.

Tags: Customer Portal, Incident Management, self service

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Customer Portal, Getting Started, Hints and Tips, Incident Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.