The customer portal

Customers don't need an account

Your customers can see their jobs without signing up, without a password, and without installing anything, and that won't change. A property manager checking whether someone turned up won't create an account to find out. They'll ring the office instead, and the portal is there to save you that call. All a customer needs is access to their own email.

Two kinds of link

The portal uses two different kinds of link, and they give access to very different things.

• A link to one job is in every status email: booked in, in progress and completed. It's safe to forward, because it only opens the job the email was about. Anyone who gets a forwarded status email can only see what the email already told them.
• A link to the whole job list is a sign-in link. A customer asks for one, or you send one from their page. It works like a password: it lasts 30 minutes, works once, and once it's used the customer stays signed in for a couple of hours.

A link that opens a customer's whole job list is never put in an email they might forward. Your customer is often a property manager who forwards your emails to the tenant who reported the fault, to the owner, or to the caretaker. That's a normal part of their job. A link to one job is fine to forward any number of times, because it doesn't show anything new. A link to every job that customer has ever raised would.

What a customer can do

With either link, a customer can see their jobs and how far along each one is. The portal uses customer-friendly names for each stage: Received, Booked in, In progress and Completed. They can open a job to read the same summary your team sees, and they can add a photo or video to it. That's handy when "it's still leaking" is easier to show than to describe.

They can't comment or reply in the portal. There's no message box on a job page, and uploads don't have captions. If a customer wants to say something about a job, they reply to the email, and the reply is added to the job like any other reply. See your own WorkOrders address for how replies get back to the right job.

Letting customers raise a request

A customer can also start a job from the portal, but only if you switch that on. It's off for every company until someone turns it on under Settings → Your company. Plenty of firms want every request to come through someone who knows the customer.

A link to one job can't be used to start a request. The form only appears for a customer who has signed in with a sign-in link, which is sent to an email address you already have on a customer record. A forwarded status email isn't enough.

A request becomes a work order straight away. Nothing waits for approval where you can't see it. It appears on your board marked as coming from the portal, with the customer's own details filled in. The form doesn't ask for a name or email, because the sign-in link already showed who the customer is. It doesn't ask how urgent the job is either, because customers would choose "emergency" every time. There's a daily limit on how many requests one customer can raise, so nobody can flood your board, by accident or otherwise.

What a customer at a firm sees

It's worth knowing this before you send someone a link. If a customer belongs to an organisation (the firm they work for), their portal shows every job raised by anyone at that firm, as well as their own. John and Andy at Building Co see the same list. A customer who doesn't belong to an organisation only sees their own jobs, and that's the case for most people.

So putting someone in an organisation decides who can see whose jobs. Two households that happen to share a property manager shouldn't be in the same organisation. See organisations, customers and sites for how organisations work and what else they affect.

Managing access

On a customer's own page, in the Portal access card, you can press Send a portal link to email them a link yourself, for when someone on the phone can't find the email. You can also press Revoke portal access. WorkOrders checks for this every time the customer opens a page, so it takes effect straight away. If they're already signed in, they're signed out, and any link still sitting unread in their inbox stops working too.

An organisation's page has the same button, and it revokes access for everyone at that organisation at once. The two work separately. Revoking the organisation shuts out all of its people. Revoking one person leaves their colleagues alone. And restoring the organisation doesn't restore anyone you revoked individually. The confirmation message says so: "Portal access restored. Anyone you revoked individually still can't get in."

Two addresses, same portal

Your customers can reach the portal at your own address, yourfirm.workorders.nz, or at the main workorders.nz site. Both work. Every link in your emails uses your firm's own address, because that's the one you'd want customers to see. The main site also works for anyone who has the email but has never noticed your address.

Portal pages are hidden from search engines, and nothing on this site links to your address, so a customer who searches for your firm won't find your portal. The footer of this site does have a Customer sign-in link to the main workorders.nz sign-in page, so a customer who has lost the email doesn't have to guess a web address. That page asks for an email address and gives everyone the same reply, whether or not we have them on record. It never says which firm an address belongs to, or whether it belongs to one at all.

One sign-in, every supplier you deal with

Asking for a sign-in link at your own address and asking for one at workorders.nz give the customer different things. At yourfirm.workorders.nz, they get a link from your firm, with your name on it, that only shows your jobs.

At the main workorders.nz sign-in page, a customer gets one email, from us, that doesn't name any firm. That page only knows the email address that's asking, not which firms on WorkOrders that person deals with. The link signs them in to every supplier on WorkOrders they're a customer of, and shows your jobs alongside the others. If they only deal with you, it looks exactly the same as signing in at your own address.

This doesn't change what you can see. You only ever see your own jobs on your own customer's page, and revoking someone only affects your firm. If they also deal with another supplier on WorkOrders, they keep that access. Your jobs just disappear from their list the next time they open it.

Questions people ask