Customers use three pages: a contact page, a page where they read your replies and answer back, and a help centre.
Setting them up:
Open Settings, General, and find Where customers go. For each page you can:
- press Create It For Me, and the desk makes the page, puts the right shortcode on it and selects it;
- pick a page you already have, and put the shortcode on it yourself: [asd_submit_ticket], [asd_portal] or [asd_kb];
- choose Somewhere else, I will type the address, and type it. Use this when, for example, your customer portal lives on another domain. Every link the desk writes, in emails and on your help centre, then uses that address exactly as typed.
The setup wizard offers the same three choices in its fourth step.
The contact page:
It does three jobs, top to bottom.
- Bought from us before? sits first. A customer types the address they bought with and is emailed a private sign-in link, with no password. Signed in, the desk has their account open while they talk to it.
- How can we help? lets anyone type what is happening and get an answer from your help centre on the same screen, before any email address is asked for.
- Contact Support is the form. Name is optional. Email, subject and message are needed. Product is optional and comes from Settings, Products. Customers can also add screenshots or files.
The first two are covered in The Chat On Your Contact Page, and you can switch them on and off on the Knowledge Base screen.
The form:
While someone types, it asks your knowledge for matching articles and shows up to three before they press send; switch that off in Settings, Automation. The product a customer picks settles the whole conversation: from then on the desk answers about that product, in the name you gave it, with its own line and page in front of the AI, whether the customer is signed in or not. After sending, the customer sees their reference, what happens next, and is told to look for the confirmation email. A hidden field catches bots, and a flood of messages from one address is slowed down.
Screenshots and files:
Customers can send pictures (JPG, PNG, GIF, WEBP or HEIC), PDF, text, CSV files and zips with a ticket, up to 10 MB each and four at a time. They are stored privately, never handed out to the public, and listed on the ticket for you to open.
The customer does not wait for the AI. The thank-you appears first; sorting, resolving and drafting start a moment later, once the customer's message is attached to the ticket.
The My Tickets page:
A customer's tickets open only for someone who followed a private link the desk emailed to that address, or someone logged in to your WordPress site under it. Every email the desk sends carries that link, so there is no password to remember. The link is signed, lasts 30 days and cannot be edited to point at another customer.
Someone who arrives without a link types their email and is sent one. The page says the same thing whether or not that address has tickets, so it cannot be used to find out who your customers are.
Signed in, the customer sees their tickets as cards with plain statuses (We are on it, Waiting for you, Solved), opens one to read the whole conversation, replies from the page, adds screenshots or files to a reply with Add a screenshot or file, and can press This Is Solved, Thank You. New Ticket and Sign Out sit at the top of a ticket as well as on the list, because inside a ticket is where somebody realises they have a second thing to ask about. The Follow Your Ticket button in every email signs them straight in and opens that ticket, on every kind of hosting.
When a customer adds to a ticket or reopens one, the page tells them in words that it arrived and that your team has it. Unless you switch it off in Settings, Email, they are also emailed We got your update with what they wrote and the button to follow the ticket. Several updates in a few minutes get one confirmation, and a reply sent by email is never answered with another email. You get a single alert saying exactly what happened, following your choices in Settings, Email. Solved and closed tickets sit in their own group underneath and still open to read, and a Reopen This Ticket button brings one back if the problem returns, with an optional note; you are emailed and the ticket shows who reopened it. Underneath their tickets they see their license keys, each with a Copy button, and a list of what they own. That is how keys reach a customer with nothing for you to set up: the reply tells them, and the button under it opens the page where the key is waiting. Amounts are never shown. Replying to a solved ticket reopens it. Your private notes and AI drafts you have not approved are never sent to this page, and nothing about money is shown.
If your portal address is on another domain, emails link to that address and leave signing in to it.
The help centre:
[asd_kb] renders your searchable knowledge base and accepts category and limit attributes, for example [asd_kb category="billing" limit="30"]. A visitor can also ask a question in their own words and get an answer written from your documentation. See Feeding It Your Own Documentation, And The Search That Answers.
Your own header and footer:
Your knowledge base articles can wear a designed help centre layout at /kb/, and your contact page can become a full-page Support Centre. See The Support Centre And Your Help Centre Pages.
All three load their stylesheet and script only on pages that contain one of the shortcodes.