[45] – Autotask Implementation Series: Customer Portal

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP with your hosts, Rayanne Buccianico and Chris Tim. Learn how to get the most out of your PSA tool and manage your business by maximizing profitability and increasing efficiency within your MSP business. Let's listen in. Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact with your hosts, myself, Chris Tim, and my co-host, Rayanne Buccianico. Hey, Rayanne, how are you doing today?

I'm doing great today. Chris, how are you? How are things over there? Good, thank you. It's typical British weather over here today, overcast, rainy, and it's the middle of spring, so go figure.

Well, it's typical Florida weather here. It's hot, it's muggy, and oppressively hot. You know what, Rayanne, I've decided I'm not going to do this podcast with you anymore if you keep telling me how good the weather is over there. I'm pretty sure I didn't just say that, but that's OK. Yeah, I know, but it's always good in Florida, I know.

What are we talking about today, Chris? I think we're continuing on our implementation series, and we're coming close to the end, I think. But we're still right now on the service desk. Yeah? We are.

We are still on the service desk to some extent. So we're actually going to be talking really about the customer portal today. So we're going to be talking about what is the customer portal or client portal, whichever way you want to look at it, how does it work, how does it integrate with the tickets, with the categories, all that kind of good stuff. I get this question all the time. One of the first things everybody wants to do is open up that client portal and have all of their customers start logging in, reading tickets, and creating tickets of their own.

So I usually tell them to, hey, let's not rush right into that client portal, because if it's not set up properly, you've got everything wide open to them, and it will often cause more problems than it solves. So let's just take it one step at a time. Absolutely. So I guess the thing to look at is to say, what is the client portal? Why do we need it, and what's it there for?

And I have that same question all the time, is why is it in the system? And really, the reason is, I guess the name says it all. It's a portal that your customers can log into that is allowing them to go in and create new tickets, allows them to update tickets, but not only just the tickets as well, but also to view their invoices, to view any projects that they might have assigned to them, and any kind of reports that you might want to put up there as well. So it's a full portal that just allows your customers to get all of that information, to really quickly be able to see what tickets have been assigned to them and their team, their invoices, their projects, and even actually work with you on projects as well. So you can give your customers the ability to actually assign them a project task, which we'll be covering in the next few episodes of the podcast.

We'll be talking about project management and all about how you can get your customers to actually interact with you on projects as well. So Chris, now that we know that we want to set up this client portal for our company, what's the first thing that we want to do? Because of course we can head straight into the client portal. It's in the admin section under extensions and integrations and you'll see the client portal in the task fire. Now, one thing I want to make sure that everybody understands, this is not the email parser.

This is not going to enable your customers to be able to email you and have a ticket open in Autotask. This is an actual portal where they will log in and see all of the tickets and based on the settings that you've assigned to them. So what's the first thing that they ought to do? Absolutely, so you're right. So the first thing they want to do is they want to go under the admin module extensions and integrations.

And then the very first thing we want to do is to go into the manage clients. And that is really turning on the client portal for which clients you want to enable it for. So there will be some options in there where you can select the name of the client and then you go and enable it. You can either enable it directly at this point or you can go into the contact itself and there'll be a checkbox in there to go ahead and enable the portal for that client. So that will be the first thing.

What that will then do is it'll automatically generate an email for the customer, which will send it to them with whatever their password is that gets automatically generated. They'll then be able to log in and they'll be able to see any tickets, anything like that that's been assigned to them. Now, when you set up that user for the first time, there's different security levels that you can, so very similar to the way that you would have it inside Autotask for normal users. So you'd have a manager user and that thing gives that user the ability to manage other users. For example, they'll be able to go in and add which other users in the company they actually want to be added to the portal.

The other thing that they will be able to do from there, if they're a manager, they'll be able to see the tickets for everyone in that company. So you might then say, hey, this person is maybe the person who is gonna log tickets on behalf of somebody else. So you would go in there and create them as a manager. When they log in, they'll be able to not just see their own tickets, but see tickets for the entire company as well. Right, so you wanna make sure that you are assigning the right permissions and the right security level for each level.

Because what you don't want is to have somebody logging into your client portal and looking at all of the tickets and all of the invoices if they are not authorized to view that information at the company level. So take a few minutes and read through each one of those security level options and make sure that you're choosing. Now, it's always my preference to start them off at the bottom and let them complain a little and say, oh, you're right, let me just add that permission for you so that you can see this. This way you have the opportunity to check with their superior or their manager to make sure that they are indeed entitled to that information without assuming that everybody has access to everything. Another thing that you can do really is as you're setting it up, talk to the decision makers at your customers and say, these are some of the options.

Who do you want to have each of these permissions and kind of maybe head that off at the past before start opening up the floodgates of the portal and dumping all of your autotask information out for everybody to see. Yeah, absolutely. I agree. And I think it's all about understanding which users you want to have, which access to the portal. So when you actually go in and activate those users, it does ask you, there are three kind of levels built in.

There's basic, there's manager and there's standard, I think. So manager gives you full access to everything. Well, when I say gives you, it gives the end user or the end customer, full access to everything. And that would be things like your invoices or all of those kinds of things. And it does that out of the box by default.

Of course, you can turn those off or you can edit that security level and decide even at a manager level what things they can and can't see as well. Okay, so we've got the security level set up. We've got the customer accounts activated. And now what we want to do is start to limit the things that they can choose, right? Okay, customer logs into the portal and they're ready to open up a ticket.

Now, you don't want them to have about 50 decisions to make before they can enter this ticket into your system. So consider the things that you want them to be able to set up because we can always attach workflow rules. And of course, Chris's favorite topic, ticket categories. And so we can really limit some of the things that the customer is allowed to choose based on either their security level or the options that they have in creating a ticket. What are some of the things that you like to set up for the customer portal?

Absolutely. So actually the next thing that we need to set up before they can log in and start to do things, we need to set up what we call request types. So that is really going to be a dropdown list. You know, when they log into the portal, there's going to be a bunch of requests that they can use. So that's going to be very similar things to what we talked about in the ticket categories.

So, you know, new user requests, password reset, all of those kinds of things. And actually what's really nice about those client portal request types is that basically they will actually link into the ticket category as well. So if you've got a particular ticket category with some user defined fields in there, you can have those user defined fields display inside the client portal inside that request type. So it gives you the ability to say, this is the ticket category I want to link it to. These are the user defined fields I want to display on there.

So you can have your customer filling all of that stuff in as well. You can also then choose, for example, by default, you know, what queues the ticket automatically goes into. So when it's created, it goes into the client portal queue by default. Yeah, I was just about to actually say that, that the service, you don't really want your customer to decide what queue their ticket is going to land in. And you may not want your customer to decide what work type goes along with this ticket.

You can set all of these things up either at the ticket category or at the request type level and, you know, really narrow down the different options that the customer has or the decisions that they're going to need to make. Absolutely, yep. And that's what it's really designed for is to say, yeah, giving them the ability to say, again, you know, do you even want them to select the queue and why would you want them to select the queue, right? But maybe you may have a scenario or an instance where you may have a customer that's slightly more IT savvy. So you might then want to say, well, you know, that particular customer, maybe I want them to select a queue.

So I want them to drop this into the first line or second line support queue. So you can give them the ability to actually have that happen as well. So yeah, it really allows you to just customize how you actually get that information in, what gets displayed on the form in the client portal, and then also, you know, which fields, if there's any kind of priority questions on this, you can even have them enter things like, you know, this ticket affects me, it affects all users. It's high priority, but it only affects one user or it's low priority, but everyone's affected. Whatever the case might be, you can really kind of, you know, check the box to say enable priority questions as well.

You know, another thing that you can even do, and you must be reading my mind today because you mentioned the priority questions, but you can also ask generic questions too. What's the best number to reach you at? Or, you know, how should we email you? Or what's the best email address or something like that? Because otherwise you're going to receive the Autotask default contact information from this user.

But if they're working remotely that day, or, you know, if they need to be contacted a different way, or perhaps you ask something like, what happens when you try to do this? Or did you reboot? You know, there's some, you know, very simple, you know, questions that you can pop up on the screen and force them to answer before they continue on with creating the ticket. Absolutely. And yeah, so you can kind of force a lot of those questions.

You can force them down a particular route on the portal. Now, and then we mentioned earlier on, one of the other things that you can do with the portal, certainly from a management user perspective, is give them the ability to see invoices. Now, really, this is only going to be, you know, invoices that have been generated out of Autotask. But if you are then sending them the invoice through QuickBooks, so you're producing it in Autotask and getting it into QuickBooks, what they're going to see in the client portal is the Autotask invoice, not the QuickBooks invoice. And that's another reason why I always encourage people to have both the Autotask and the accounting system invoice match.

Exactly, because what that would then do is it would bring in the number from QuickBooks or from Xero or whichever accounting package you're using, make the Autotask invoice number that same number. And then when you're looking at it on the client portal, the customer will be able to see those invoices, you know, directly from the portal. Of course, there are other third-party tools that do that kind of thing as well. Anyway, a lot of the other tools like, you know, Connect Booster and some of these other tools actually allow you to view the invoices and the integration with Xero allows you to view both of them from within the same portal. But, you know, really just to make our listeners aware that, you know, what you're going to get inside the client portal is going to be the Autotask generated invoice.

So the look and feel of it is going to be whatever comes out of Autotask, not the same one that comes out of QuickBooks or Xero or any of those tools. So once you have your client portal set up and it's being used the way you like, you can always, again, like I mentioned earlier, set up your workflow rules, you know, so that when that ticket comes in, you can forward it to a particular queue. If it's got some sort of, you know, priority mapping that you can set up. So there's a number of things that you can do with that ticket after it comes in to the system. You can have somebody notified that, hey, a new ticket came in with a high priority and just to, you know, make sure that somebody, it's on somebody's radar.

There's other things like, you know, custom URLs that you can add in. So I highly recommend if you're planning to use the client portal, you know, to get in there and fish around, look at all of the different options and put together an entire plan of how you want to roll it out and what you want it to do for your company and for your customers and get that plan together completely before you start clicking buttons, enabling these things. Absolutely, and one of the things, as part of that planning phase that you were talking about, Rayanne, is, you know, the ability to rebrand or brand the portal, if you like. So you have the ability to use the customer's logo so that when they log in, they get their own brand or their own logo entered in, as well as kind of on the main screen, on the generic link that you give to everyone, might be your logo as the MSP, but once your customers have logged in and gone through that main login screen, they're then going to hit their own logo and potentially their own colors and all of that kind of stuff. So it's really important to decide when you're planning these things is to actually decide how you want to do this.

You know, do you want to have a, and I've actually seen a lot of my customers actually that are using the client portal are co-branding. So they've kind of got the logo that's designed with, you know, their logo and the client's logo, and they upload those for every single customer. And that will then, when the customer logs in, they'll see the MSP's logo, as well as their own logo and their own branding as well. You know, and that's really important, especially for the customer's employees who may or may not recognize your name, but they will recognize their own company's logo. You know, so if you are rolling this out to all of the end users and giving them the opportunity to log in, create tickets or check on things or whatever, it's always a comforting feeling when they go to a particular website, see their company's logo and know that it's a safe portal for them to log in.

Yeah. So, I mean, and it really is as simple as that. There really isn't anything majorly complicated about the portal. It's just really there to allow your clients to use a portal where they can go in and, you know, look at the tickets, update the tickets, collaborate on projects, all that kind of good stuff. Well, I think this was a great conversation.

I know when we finish or when we resume our implementation series, because I think we have a special guest next week. Is that true? We do. We have a special guest on the next episode. Yes.

We won't tell anyone yet who that special guest is. I think we'll leave everyone in suspense so that when that episode drops in their podcast player, they'll know who that guest is. The following week, we will come back and I think we're about to dive into projects, the project module. And the one thing that I always say about the project module is that it's like its own individual animal within Autotask. Because you can run all of Autotask without ever touching a project if you want it.

It's not one of those necessary things, but boy, if you are using projects or doing projects in your company, is it super, super helpful on so many levels. So we're going to dive into those things. Absolutely, we are. And then after that, you know, you mentioned about a special guest as another vendor that we talk into, but one of the things we'd really like to encourage people to do is, you know, we're looking for some MSPs that might have some kind of burning issue that they want to talk to Ray-Anne and I about. And we'd like to put it out there that we want to offer the ability for somebody to come on the podcast and actually talk to us about some issues that they have.

So, you know, if there's any of our listeners that want to kind of, you know, feature as a guest on the podcast, by all means, let us know. You can either reach out to Ray-Anne and I directly, or you can go to our website and leave a message for us. We'd love to have you on and we'd love to try and diagnose your problems directly and live on the podcast. Maybe we'll call that series, the Stump the Chumps series or something like that. You know, bring us your problems and let's see if we can't find a way to solve it.

Absolutely, no, I think that would be fun. So, wow, that was a really good episode, Ray-Anne. And as always, my favorite topic to talk about, as you know, I think everyone who's listened to our podcast for a while will know that pretty much there's nothing in all of us that isn't my favorite subject. I'm still looking for it though. You won't find it.

So, yeah, so really, Ray-Anne, all that's really left for me to say right now is your PSA is the key to your MSP success. Go out and make an impact on your world today. Thanks, Chris. Cheers. Thanks, Ray-Anne.

Cheers. Thank you for joining us today on PSA Impact. We hope you've learned something and that you'll join us next time when we answer new questions posed by our listeners.