Self Service Portal

Freshdesk, the online customer engagement solution from Freshworks, lets you streamline your company's customer support using the customer service software and helps you to efficiently manage your customers as you scale. Here's what you can do with Freshdesk,

• Track and manage incoming tickets from multiple channels into one single view
• Support customers across various platforms like email, phone, call, chat, social media, and other messaging apps
• Collaborate with multiple teams within your company to split, assign and resolve queries faster as a team
• Automate redundant tasks like agent assignment based on the skill, workload, and availability
• Empower customers with a comprehensive knowledge base and self-service portal 
• Analyze and gather critical insights on agent performances and customer experience with advanced analytics
• Customize Freshdesk completely to suit your business requirements
• Leverage AI and ML capabilities of Freddy, to take some work off your agents and provide faster resolutions to customers, without compromising on the quality
  
  You can sign up for a free trial here

You can create one from under freshdesk.com, using the 'Sign up' option. The website will collect your contact information before creating a new Freshdesk Trial Account for you.

Alternatively, you can use the below link to sign up for a new Freshdesk account -
https://freshdesk.com/signup

Happy Supporting!

If you would like your customers (and agents) to access your support portal using your own domain, you can point your default support URL yourcompany.freshdesk.com to your own domain like support.yourcompany.com. 

Please refer to this article for more instructions on how you can be configured.

On the customer portal, your customers will be able to use the New Support Ticket option to submit tickets from the portal. This option can be made available to either all users or logged-in users only as well, by making changes to the User Permission section under Admin -> Channels -> Portal -> Settings.  This article has detailed information on setting it up.

The fields that appear on the ticket creation form on the customer portal can be configured under Admin -> Workflows -> Ticket fields.

When a customer is creating tickets, you could configure your Freshdesk Account to auto-suggest solution articles based on the ticket subject that the customer enters, during ticket creation. This would also reduce ticket volume by deflecting the Customer to the corresponding Solution Article.

You can enable auto-suggestion of solution articles under Admin --> Channels --> Portals --> Edit --> Manage sections and checkmark the option "Auto suggest solutions while creating a new ticket" After this, solution articles visible to customers will be auto-suggested based on the customer's entered Subject or Description when creating the ticket.

Enabling captcha would the best way to eliminate SPAM tickets. You can enable captcha from under Admin-> Channels -> Portals -> Edit -> Manage sections -> check mark Enable CAPTCHA to help avoid spam. It is recommended to enable Captcha for tickets submitted by non logged in users and also for new forum topics. The logged in users are considered as verified users in Freshdesk, hence no Captcha is taken from them.

You can use the below-displayed code to restrict the customer from editing the ticket fields after a ticket is submitted. 

Please navigate to Admin--> Channels > Portals -->Customize portal-->Layout & pages-->Portal pages-->paste the below code under the Ticket details section,

<script>

  jQuery('#portal_ticket_form .controls').each(function() { 

    jQuery(this).children().attr('disabled','disabled'); 

  });

  jQuery('#helpdesk_ticket_submit').attr('disabled','disabled')

</script>

This would be possible only from the Estate plan onwards in Freshdesk. 

This can be done by enabling the option 'Only logged in users can submit a ticket in the portal' under Admin-> Channels > Portals -> Settings and choose the opens available under User permissions for portal. 

You can pre-populate the users' email addresses and grey-out the field so that they will not be able to edit the email address when the user is logged in. This can be done by greying out the 'Requester' field using a jQuery script.

The code that you'll have to use is - 

{% if portal.has_user_signed_in %}

<script type='text/javascript'>

jQuery('#helpdesk_ticket_email').prop('disabled', true);

</script>

{% endif %}

You would have to place this code below the existing code under Admin --> Channels --> Portals --> Customize portal --> Layouts & Pages --> Portal Pages --> New Ticket and then click on Save & Publish.

This option would be available from the Estate plan onwards.

The portal is your first impression when the customers come in for support. We believe in paving the way to let your creative side take over and transform the way it looks! On the Garden plan, you would be able to perform only CSS customizations, which would be a common customization change for the entire portal. 

From the Estate plan onwards, you would have the ability to have page-level customizations which would allow you to modify almost all pages on your portal, individually. This is an article that would help you with an elaboration.

Freshdesk has a predefined gallery of templates available, that you could readily apply on your account to customise your Support Portal. These CSS templates are called Freshthemes. You could find them listed under the Freshthemes Gallery.

The option to include Freshtheme is available only from the Estate Plan onwards in Freshdesk.

Freshthemes are not available directly to the users as of now. The only available themes were

• Marina theme - latest
• Mint theme
• Classic theme - oldest.

which can be customized according to your needs.

The download would contain a folder, with text files containing the code that would go under each section within Admin--> Channels --> Portals --> Customize --> Edit theme  to edit the existing theme. If you want to import click Import theme to import from zip file. To learn more about importing themes, click here. After customizing, Preview  and "Save and Publish" the changes.

Please go to Admin > Channels > Portals > Customize > Edit theme > Layouts & Pages and make the following changes.

Header:

<script>

jQuery('#header-tabs a[href='/support/solutions']').text('Knowledge base');

</script>

Footer:

<script>

jQuery('.footer-links a[href='/support/solutions']').text('Knowledge base');

</script>

Search results:

<script>

jQuery('.nav-filter li a[href^='/support/search/solutions?term']').text('Knowledge Base');

</script>

Note: 

1)This can only be done on accounts in the Estate and Forest plan (older plan structure).

2)If multiple languages are set up on the helpdesk, you would need to specify the languages.

For example, if the helpdesk languages are English and French, here is the script for header:

<script>
jQuery('#header-tabs a[href="/en/support/solutions"]').text("Knowledgebase");
jQuery('#header-tabs a[href="/fr/support/solutions"]').text("Base de connaissances");
</script>

To learn more about portal customization, click here.

To prevent the portal from being crawled on a Google Search, you can have the following code attached under Portal customizations. This would available only for accounts on the Estate and Forest plans, though. 

To hide the entire portal, please go to Admin --> Channels --> Portals --> Customize portal --> Layouts & Pages --> Portal Layout --> Head and add the below mentioned tag:

<META NAME='ROBOTS' CONTENT='NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW'>

If you are looking to hide only the Solutions tab from being crawled, please paste the following tag- 

{% if current_tab == 'solutions' %}

<meta name='robots' content='noindex, nofollow'>

{% endif %}

Apart from the global settings under Admin-> Channels -> Portals-> Settings, you would also have to ensure that the folders have been given global access. Under Solutions, when you click on the category name, then the folder name, and choose edit, you would find an option to choose the visibility for this folder.

You can choose to make the folder visible to all, only to logged-in users or agents alone depending on your requirement. You can go further and make it visible to specific companies by entering their name

If you do not wish your customers to login to your portal, but only to view the content which is made available on it, you could hide the login button from your portal. 

To hide the login button, you can use the following code under the Stylesheet section:

a[href*='login']

{display:none;}

This can be found under Admin --> Channels --> Portals --> Customize --> Edit theme > Stylesheet and would be available from the Garden plan onwards.

The portal could be tweaked by using the customization features available with Freshdesk - the level of customization depends upon the plan you are on. Sometimes, you would want to revamp your portal for which you need to start from scratch and you would want to reset the existing changes made to the portal. 

Please navigate to Admin --> Channels --> Portals --> Customize Portal to be taken to the page where you can make the customization changes. Once you are there, browse through any or all of the tabs there, to go to the bottom of the page and find the Reset button - when you click on this, you would be given two options - reset to last published or reset all changes. Please choose the option based on your requirement. 

The default behavior in Freshdesk is that the users will be redirected to the Portal Home page when they access the Customer portal.

If you are looking to show the Tickets page or the Solutions page instead of the portal home, below is a small hack to do that. 

Please add this code under Admin --> Channels --> Portals --> Customize portal --> Layout & Pages --> Portal pages --> Portal home.

<script type='text/javascript'>
  window.location.href = 'https://domain.freshdesk.com/support/solutions';
</script>

This code will redirect the user to the solutions page when they access the portal home page. Similarly, You could replace the URL with the tickets page URL to redirect users to the tickets page.

This is available only from the Estate plan onwards.

Note: In the code, please replace domain.freshdesk.com with your Freshdesk URL.

The portal is your first impression when the customers come in for support. We believe in paving the way to let your creative side take over and transform the way it looks! On the Estate plan, we have a feature called "portal customization" which would allow you to make changes to every page in the portal. 

Say, for example, you would want to design the layout of your portal, you would have the power to customize the header, footer, and overall layouts. So once you're in the Estate plan, bring out the artistic genius in you using our feature :) 

Kindly navigate to this document understand what we offer in the Estate plan and above:

https://support.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/65026-complete-layout-customization

The Create New Ticket option on Freshdesk Support Portal has been replaced with Help Widget. We wanted to empower our users to seek instant answers for their queries. So, we brought in some changes and introduced the brand new Help Widget. 

With this experience, you can easily search and browse through our FAQs. You can also use the 'Get in touch' option to submit a support ticket. Alternatively, you could also write to support@freshdesk.com. One of our Support Agents would get in contact with you to assist further.

Freshdesk is a multi-channel support tool, which acts as a single platform where all customer queries come in. The different support channels include - Email, Phone, Chat (from Garden Plan onwards), Facebook, Website (Portal and Feedback Widget), and E-commerce.

You could configure the same at your end(from under Admin-->Channels) after which the customers would be able to create tickets from the above channel, to reach you.

It is always best to write your own elements since you have access and the space to write your own script, HTML. This way, your elements are independent from the default elements we have provided and would not result in the page breaking. For instance, we could have used the style of the header in more than one place in the website and so overwriting it will automatically reflect it in the other places of the website.

To have different side bars, you need to enclose class under a parent element. 

Example:

.custom-homepage {

 .sidebar{

   //your css code here

 }

}

.custom-category-page {

 .sidebar{

   //your css code here

 }

}

If you are looking to customise the profile page, you can style it with the scripts in the header that will be carried to the profile page. The 'Edit' page has Header and Footer.

The page is not customisable and so it is not possible to achieve the color coding using a custom script. However, by default, you can see the color coding on the sidebar based on priority as:

“Current_page_name” This is a liquid object used to cull out the name of the current page. Through this, you can see the portal homepage, New Ticket Page, Solutions Page, Edit Page etc. As a workaround, you can use jQuery scripts to get the current page URL.

Go to Admin > Channels > Portal > Customize portal > Layouts & Pages > Portal pages >Discussions > Topic View. Replace user.name as user.firstname in the places where user.name is mentioned in the css code of the topic view page. 

Using Freshdesk, you could configure your self-service portal such that customers would be able to view the portal in different languages. To configure the same, please navigate to Admin--> Account --> Helpdesk Settings --> Manage Languages. You could add to the list of Supported Languages. 

Once that is done, you would have to choose the "Visible On Portal" option so that the languages are visible to customers on your support portal from where they could choose the Portal Languages.

This feature is available from the Garden Plan onwards in Freshdesk.

You could navigate to Admin --> Account --> Helpdesk Settings --> Manage Languages and remove the Listed Support Languages from that page. This would remove multilingual support on your portal.

This would also delete the articles and email notifications that were created for each supported language.

When you are setting up users in your account - you would have requirements to allow logged-in users/ verified customers to be able to view or submit tickets. In some other instances, you would want them to easily access the content of the ticket using a public ticket URL that has no signing in hassles. 

For all these configurations, please navigate to Admin -> Channels -> Portals -> click on the Settings tab to see all the user permissions for tickets, solutions, and forums. 

At times, there might be instances where you need to create a ticket on behalf of a customer who reached out to you directly, or for proactive support.

You can do this under '+New' -> New Ticket. You enter the Requester Information, Ticket Subject, and Description and other mandatory fields to raise a ticket on behalf of the Requester.

You could rebrand your Freshdesk Account by changing the Helpdesk Logo and Favicon. To update your Logo, please navigate to Admin --> Channels --> Portals --> Edit the Portal --> Branding --> Change Logo/Favicon. 

You could upload the image of your Logo or Favicon and Save it to rebrand the Logo of your Freshdesk Account.

At times, an agent might need tickets for his/her own reference.

Such a ticket can be created by clicking on New ticket icon from the Menu bar. The SLA timers would still be ticking on such tickets.

As a workaround, the agent can send in an email ticket (send an email to the support email address) and then reply or can add a public note to the same ticket from Freshdesk, this way the First response SLA would not be violated.

An agent is a user in your helpdesk who takes care of the support activities as a full-time job. An agent can be assigned the role of an admin, supervisor or given a custom role with specified duties. 

However, a collaborator is a third-party member you invite to be part of a support ticket. These collaborators are not part of your helpdesk but can be added to specific tickets as a one-time activity. 

A few scenarios where you can add collaborators are to provide approvals on a refund request, provide insights on a business use case or give information related to resolving the ticket.

Admins can invite Collaborators from outside the team to your Freshdesk account to collaborate on tickets or give your agents the privilege to invite collaborators.

Collaborators will then receive an email inviting them to log into their Freshdesk account. They can then view the ticket and customer details and collaborate by responding to the private note and helping full-time agents resolve the ticket faster.

Freshworks Neo Platform is a flexible, end-to-end, AI-powered enterprise platform that offers a set of services that are leveraged by all the applications in the Freshworks portfolio. It is a centralized console offering customizable security and administration solutions across Freshworks products. Admins can leverage different authentication and authorization solutions, various security controls to customize, and simplified agent and account management.
 

When you first sign up for a Freshworks product, an Organization is created. You can access the Neo Admin Center using the Organization URL or Freshworks URL that looks something like this: yourcompany@freshworks.com. It binds every customer accounts across the Freshworks portfolio together. As an organization admin, you can easily access all the accounts, security settings, and agents under a single glass pane.

When you sign up for a standalone Freshdesk account, you will be provided with a Freshdesk URL address or subdomain that your admins and agents will use to log in to your Freshdesk account. Your customers will also use it to access your self-service portal. E.g., acmesupport.freshdesk.com