Halo Implementation Series -Self Service Portal. – Video 18

hey everyone and welcome to another installment in the Halo implementation series um this week we are going to be talking about the end user portal how to set it up how to configure it all that kind of stuff with me today um I have my good friend um Morgan aspel who as you all know is Mr Halo um we haven't spoken for a while Morgan I've been away I know you've been away so how's things been going yeah it's been a couple of weeks um I imagine the the community are like where have all the videos gone um so yeah good to good to hop back on a session with You Chris and I'm sure you've been missing being called Mr Halo as well right I was abroad in in like 10,000 miles away and I was still scratching your head I bet you could probably I actually um I on a couple of the visits that I've been on at and speaking with uh customers remotely um they've mentioned that they've seen the videos um and so so yeah you they're they're calling me it as well now and the name's catching on absolutely you're going to be signing autograph soon man yeah I can't wait I cannot wait absolutely so yeah let's let's talk about end user portal kind of how to set it up and um you know and go through the the whole process yeah absolutely um I I suppose this is going to be one of the one of the last sessions that we do for a while at least where it's just a sort of pure showand tell um we've covered a lot of the broad Strokes of the platform um this is one of the last sort of big missing pieces um and over the coming weeks and months the the nature of these sessions will change a little bit from just pure Show and Tell to actually looking at real world MSP examples and setting up starts and processes so I'm looking forward to that um but yeah the self-service portal um it's something that I think uh is is not widely used Enough by um by the community to be perfectly honest with you um and it's one of the great things I always say this it's one of the great things about all of the Halo products namely itsm um and PSA actually having the same code base sharing the same code because the result of that point is the fact that Halo PSA out of the box has got an Enterprise grade self-service portal um so let's have a look at how we set it up sorry I was going to say it's it's it is something I I've noticed you know with with every PSA tool is a lot of people a lot of their customers don't use the portals for a bunch of reasons and a lot of it is because um you know it's yet another place that the customers have to sign into and yet another place that they got to go and you know create tickets but you know I think one of the good things about about Halo's um uh you know end user portal or whatever whatever you want to call it is um you know it's it's so customizable and configurable that you don't have to be kind of stuck with this clunky system that no one wants to use so I think if you're not using it in your in your business and you're not encouraging your your users to to use it I would encourage you to to like you know obviously at the end of this video you know look at it and say this is something that we really can let our customers use because we can make look nice for them so absolutely and before I forget as well I do want to mention one or two ways that you can subtly promote the self-service portal the end user portal in Halo um and that is by including links in your email templates so uh there is a dollar variable uh just before we hop onto the portal just very quickly um there is a variable that we can use Link to request user and uh that will be replaced with a link to the self-service portal to uh the the particular ticket in question so link to request user um so if you wanted to sort of Drive traffic towards your self-service portal without uh you know doing anything too drastic you could always just add something into your email templates it's like click here to view live updates on your ticket highlight that text and insert your link just like so um and that's quite a nice way to to actually um you know in those email Communications with your customers they see this link they might click on it and actually like what they see um and and then that's a way of introducing your customers to the self-service portal in a very organic way um but yeah let's have a look at the self service portal itself and some of the configuration options behind it so the first point that I want to highlight is how you can actually hop between the agent application and the self-service portal uh if you want to have a look at the configuration of the portal itself and you can do that from your account details in the top right where you've got this switch to end user portal and it's just logging me in and so uh this what we're looking at here is the self-service the end user portal this is where your customers will go to check in on their tickets log tickets uh log Services check in on the status of services look at entire dashboards of information perhaps um but yeah this is the This is the End user portal the configuration that we see uh behind this firstly we'll we'll take a look at how these buttons are confi and that all sits within the configuration panel in the self-service portal option and and the options that we see on that home screen the buttons that we see here are returned via the menu buttons option that we see here so of course uh report an issue my issues and requests services and products equates to report an issue my issues and requests and so on and so forth now taking a very quick step back we can actually see just above we have some um styling configuration options and you know that includes details like what is the logo that you want to return in the top left up here um what is the welcome message that you want to display which is you know what we have here what is the color theme that we want um so you can actually completely style the selfservice portal to either uh sort of fit your MSP styling or actually brand it to your customers branding so you the self- service portal can be sort of fully white labeled so to speak yeah um so I guess just before we go on to the menu buttons there's a couple of other options here um we actually further on the point of styling you can add your own custom CSS onto the self-service portal to style the the buttons the navigation bar um any of the elements that you see on the screen here but in in whatever fashion you see fit so it's very configurable in terms of how you want the portal to be presented below that we have a few options around um authentication so we can actually uh not enforce users to log in to access access the portal so you could have like an anonymous mode uh that might have some basic details perhaps the ability to log a ticket uh look at um you know one or two open KB articles and then if you wanted some uh more sort of specific functionality or something that you needed users to log in to access you can then actually hide that behind these buttons which we'll have a look at in a moment so there's a few different options around what is required when it comes to authenticating into the portal things like do we need to authenticate to view KBS do we need to authenticate to approve or reject approval processes stuff like that um it's worth mentioning at this point as well the selfservice portal uh does have the facility for single sign on so if you've got something like the Microsoft CSP integration um you can have all of your all of users within your managed tenants all logging into the self service portal all via SSO so cool so um let's have a look at the configuration Behind These menu buttons so let's just let's take all of these out go back here go home do a control F5 we'll get a very basic screen with pretty much nothing on pretty much nothing yeah exactly one option yeah and we'll just build out some of these um menu buttons y the my invoices is based on a oh it's based on the fact that the menu button here so let's get rid of that um yeah cool so let's let's add a couple of menu buttons in and just have a look at the configuration options um behind them so uh how I tend to go about uh advising people on setting the self servos portal up is keep things really basic to start with uh just a couple of options log a ticket view tickets uh maybe view invoices or something like that um and then over time you can flesh the function functionality out uh you know further to your point Chris um if you make the self-service portal too overwhelming initially when your customers go there they're going to be like there's so many options I don't know what to do scrap that I'm just going to call instead so keeping things uh simple and you know clean so to speak is going to be beneficial in the long run so let's add a couple of options here uh and the of course the options are added by adding to the menu buttons list where here we have a series of functions um you can see there's quite a few different sort of functions that the uh these menu buttons can perform everything from uh logging a ticket of a certain type all the way through to uh a custom URL or or even a custom HTML page um which is somewhere in here custom HTML page so there's loads of different configuration options Behind These menu buttons If I want my one of my options to be new ticket just search there new ticket we've got a couple of different types here uh three to be exact uh we can lo a new ticket with a given type a new ticket with a given template or a new ticket uh with the option to select the type uh and then uh the fourth option is a new ticket with the option to select the ticket type so let's say that we just want the option to log an incident so for that I would log a ticket with a present type yeah yeah and to be honest I wouldn't actually put a ticket type on for the end user anyway because they probably wouldn't know what that means so I would normally set these up just with a um you know predefined ticket type here yeah yeah I agree um also it they probably just log everything as an incident anyway so it's like yeah point that um cool so if we wanted to you know just hardcode the ticket type in um we'd log a ticket of a given type and then we've got some configuration options that have been presented to us after clicking save namely the ticket type that we're selecting and below that we have our dashboard button restriction uh so this ties back to the the point that I just mentioned around um you can configure on a button by button basis um whether or not the user needs to be logged in authenticated to uh see Slash interact with that menu button so if we did just want someone to be able to log an incident without having to log in um we can just pick this top one or if we are requiring someone to log in obviously we pick the option below now um we do provide sort of well let's just say this very quick go back here we do provide default options for the icon uh the label and the the hint which is like the description um which in this case looks like this but we can override uh the the icon the name and the description just by clicking this button here at which point we have the default options presented to us log and incident please click here if you something like that um and then we've got our icon down here as well we could also configure the color of the icon um just some more styling options and then we have uh the option here to show on the home screen and or show on the navigation bar so a prime example here is we have this home option that we want to be able to click uh from the navigation bar wherever we are in the self-service portal but of course there's no point in having the home button on the home screen so you can uh include options in the navigation bar at the top here you can include options on the homepage as buttons or you can have them in both places yeah yeah sometimes I think it's good to kind of have them in both places well I guess as as you say like a home button you wouldn't want on the home screen but the rest I think it's always good to have it in in both places because some people yeah some customers what might want to nav up to that screen and others might want to click on the big the big Square in the middle so yeah so but it's good that it has the flexibility to um to add those options if you need them yeah um and then finally our menu buttons can have um visibility restrictions applied to them so we can uh start to restrict the menu buttons that are present on the selfservice portal perhaps by the customer that's logging in to the self service portal uh or the the top level for example so you could there is only one configuration of the self-service portal in Halo however based on who's logging into that portal they can have a very different experience um further to that point as well you can have multiple URLs navigate to the self-service portal in Halo um it's not something that I can demonstrate on this session right now but if someone is interested um you know about having multiple portals in Halo that can be done but there's still only one configuration screen so uh this is the configuration screen for all of those portals and it's all based on the visibility restrictions that we apply uh that determine the uh the experience that the individual logging into the portal has y cool um so below our menu buttons option um and I I suppose let me just add another one in real quick my tickets my tickets there we go uh notice how there's not a ticket type option up here because the configuration options that we see here are specific to the function uh Plus the options that are applicable to every menu button so cool um yeah below that we have we have these options against our home screen so firstly we have our home screen image uh which is the actual background image so I take that out you'll see the portal is not quite as pretty so yeah now it's a lot more vanilla um so you can in you can include any uh image uh you know via a URL uh is the background you've also got the option to either display the full image across the entirety of the background or just display it as a banner um where the banner is kind of the blue portion that we see here at the top top yep um couple of check boxes against some other uh parts of the home screen that we'll see so you know for example we've got this search bar at the top here we've got this uh activity feed down here personally I don't like this activity feed so one of the things that I'd recommend doing is unchecking that box and it just makes that home screen a lot more straightforward yeah yeah uh yeah so we can show we can also show our our top five knowledge based articles or or news articles or the uh status of monitored Services which we'll try and cover today if not we'll cover it in one of the upcoming sessions sure um and then finally we've got the the number of buttons the number of homepage buttons to display per Ro so depending on how many options you put on the home screen you might want to configure the buttons to be slightly wider or more compact Y Cool below that we've got uh just options against uh some some of the entities that we can search on so our search bar can search uh knowledge based articles service catalog items or tickets um and you can configure what that search is on based on our search option here and then more recently we've added an option to return a search bar uh basically uh with our navigation bar meaning that you can search for an entity wherever you are in Halo um I think we're probably going to move this up to be in line with the navbar because uh yeah that needs that needs a bit of a tweak yeah and that's nice because I think you know currently you know when I've when I've been playing with this it's you've always had to go back to the to the main screen to find that search bar so it's nice to kind of have it up in the in the menu option at the top nice cool so um below those search options we have the configuration for uh the logging of tickets um and some sort of associated functionality so firstly we've got our default ticket type uh that will just be the default option if your one of your menu buttons is log a ticket with ticket type selection this is the default option in that dropdown um you can specify whether or not you want to send an acknowledgement email to the customer when they log a ticket bya the portal or not um we've also got the option to display a message once the ticket has been logged so thanks for logging this ticket your ID is f ID some touch and basically so if we go to login incident they really need help yeah help help help yeah SOS 911 yeah well then you know it's always urgent for customers right even uh even the most UN urgent thing is always urgent yeah goes back to one of the points that we mentioned um way early on in the series where when we were talking about the visibility of fields and you know the obvious motivation for not making the priority field visible for customers because if they did they it just they just immediately P1 sorry I just cleared my cash let try again I think we're all the same though right I mean if we get the option and I I I'm guilty of that too right if I get an option to say oh yeah what's the priority of this I'm always going to go urgent because I want a response now right oh yeah even if I can actually wait a few days I'm gonna say I want it now so I think we're yeah yeah send send emails with an exclamation mark send them as important yeah do whatever you can to get top of that list um but yeah anyways the the message that we add in here uh typos and all are then returned in this message at the top so you can put a little Banner um you know add add your your own sort of flavor of you know make it a little bit Jazzy whatever or not y down here um so allow logging on behalf of other users so that basically sets this contact option at the top uh the idea being that uh someone logs into the portal and they're logging a ticket but it might actually be for someone else um at that point they can specify who the ticket is actually Four it's more of an itsm feature um generally it if you're a cut if you're an msp's customer and the customer's logging into the portal it's going to be their issue but that being said um MSP has got a customer uh maybe solicitors um the one of the managers in the solicitors might log a ticket on the portal for uh someone someone else's laptop not working so that's the motivation for this contact option here yeah um I was going to say I mean that that does happen quite a lot actually with um certainly with bigger customers right is they might have an admin person and you know it's it's that admin person whose job it is to to log a ticket so I would send them an email saying can you please log a ticket with you know it company to fix whatever so it and it does happen quite a lot and I used to have quite a lot of customers like that when I had my MSP business so um so yeah there's there's definitely that um you know that that does happen and actually sometimes that happens in even smaller companies I mean I used to have a a company there was three users and they still had to go through the the manager to log the ticket which was just bizarre but anyway yeah that is yeah um yeah yeah I suppose so uh you could you could have it across everyone in the company um that might be that might be a good example of this other option that we have here so uh that that small free person company that that you're referring to uh they still had to go through the manager let's say the manager had to log the tickets for all three individuals um that's also an option in Halo and that's based on this um logging of tickets on behalf of other users based on the users's web access level now what is web access level so slight tangent I suppose but still relevant to the the portal um as as I'm going through these these options um and you know from from the example let's say of uh viewing tickets right um as I'm going through I'm creating these tickets uh and sort of fleshing out Self Service portal something that might be in the back of your mind is uh okay how do I configure the permissions that an end user has to the self service portal an obvious example being can we have uh one of the manager of one of my customers be able to view all of the tickets at their company um but the the new starter at the same company only view their own tickets yeah so of course you can um you can establish the permissions that are are set for your end users and one of the uh fundamental aspects for that is fing their role right well yeah setting their role we'll talk about roles in just a second but um setting their web access [Music] level so a user via the permissions tab has this web access level at the top here so there's a few options in here it's sort of everything from no access to this particular end user all the way through to sort of uh Global access um and so this web access level in this case is saying what level of tickets can Jennifer Williams see can Jennifer just see her own tickets can Jennifer see all tickets at sindel Consulting Maine all tickets across SEL Consulting client record or just all tickets globally um so yeah it's this web access level that sets the level of access that an end user has to tickets in the platform um which then ties back to this option that I was referring to uh where we're having it based on web access level so it might be that in Mario and Luigi's Pizza Place Mario is the boss and Luigi is the new starter and Mario needs to see Luigi's tickets but Luigi can't see Mario's tickets and Mario needs to be able to log a ticket on behalf of Luigi but Luigi Can Only log a ticket on behalf of himself so to do something like that we would make sure that Luigi's per web access level is this users tickets but Mario's web access level is customers tickets they can see everything yeah for the entire see everything at customer level yeah and then furthermore in our self-service portal configuration we' want to make sure that uh the logging on behalf of other users is based on web access level which means that Mario can log tickets on behalf of all customers but Luigi Can Only log tickets on behalf of himself himself y um there's a few other options in the permissions tab of course we here directly below we've got our asset access level which is basically web access level but for assets uh instead of tickets yeah um we've also got the uh this option here um where this relates to this dropdown that we have in the the my tickets uh section so if a user's web access level is greater than their own tickets maybe they can view site tickets um then there's this drop down here to specify um what access they want when looking at the list of tickets that we have in here uh this option will restrict the options in this dropdown but still allow the tickets to be returned in the search uh We've also got some options around the level of documents that the user can see whether or not they can see agreements in the self service portal whether or not they can access the service catalog and if they can their service access level we will certainly be covering these either in this session or the next yeah whether or not they can view invoices Etc so um the permissions here these are our end user permissions we saw way back when the agents had permissions and those permissions established what the agent can interact with the agent portal and now we're having a look at some of the permissions that relate to end users via the end user portal um and you had a you made a a good point there about setting the role so just like agents have roles and uh just like the motivation of Agents have roles to template the permissions well users have roles as well so on the right hand side here we have this roles section uh of which we don't have any but if I were to go to configuration users user roles I could create one in here and then we have this permissions Tab and again just like with our agents um and our agent roles the permissions tab that we have here is very similar to the permissions tab that we just saw at user level so we can configure user roles setting things like the web access level whether aren't they canie documents invoices agreements uh whether or not they can uh partake in approvals that kind of stuff um we can set all of that at role level and then apply those roles yeah to our end users yeah that's it yeah I think it's better to do it at the role level anyway because then you can just have that role like as a manager you might have three managers in the company right you don't want to now go and set each one of their permissions individually you'd want to kind of go well use the role instead and then just apply it to those different yeah it's air it's a relatively new addition I remember in my days of onboarding we didn't have user roles and it was exactly that it was wait so I've got to go in and I've got to configure these permissions for all of the users that don't apply to the default and it's like yep um but yeah fortunately we can template that now into our roles and it it streamlines the whole process yeah cool all right let's go back to our portal config uh right what else we got here assets dis asset display behavior um so I mean these are relatively self-explanatory basically it's specifying um the assets that appear in this table um and what options do we do we want access to do we want site level do we want just the user level I think we also have in here um oh no well do we want site level or do we want who we're logging on behalf of um anything else don't think think these are that important this one's quite an important one showa compliance information um do you your you're a brave MSP if you are returning your current SLA State and SLA time to your customers um if you don't want to do that then uncheck this box so basically with this checked when your end users are looking at their tickets the SLA timer will actually be present there um which is nice but yeah you're Your brave MSP if you do that I suppose and if you didn't want to return that and just simply return the current status you can uncheck that box um a nice one is whether or not you want to show workflow progress so again if you do have uh like a triage process in place and uh you've got a workflow Pro you've got a workflow stages of you know triage in progress resolved closed something like that you can return that up top here and it's it's funny you mentioned about the um I was just thinking about that as you were as you were saying about you know being a brave MSP kind of showing your customers SLA so so we used to do that all the time um in the business well not not show them on the portal but we said needed to send the customer report saying here's all the slas we've missed here's all the slas we've oh hit um only because from our point of view was like we just want to be open and honest and transparent for the customer and you know at the end of the day we're only humans so you know we we screwed up on these ones sorry Mr customer we'll try better next time um most of the time they didn't care um but yeah we never we never showed the status as it was progressing but it was definitely a case of you know here's the ones we've messed up on these are why we missed him um yeah you know etc etc um because we just wanted to say you know there's there's nothing we're hiding from our our customers in terms of of being open and honest and transparent and um you know and and when you mess up I'm a big big believer of going well you know what we've messed up we're human you know we'll try better next time I couldn't agree more um and we will have a look in one of the upcoming sessions at how we can display dashboards on the selfservice portal um and and I totally get showing tickets that have met and missed their SLA that's that's like a key metric in any qbr um but do you want to show your customer the actual SLA timer yeah no I wouldn't want to show them the actual SL timer because well I I guess it depends on the customer right and it depends on who they are but yes I certainly wouldn't want to show to every single customer just thinking back on when I when I ran my business about some of the customers I would absolutely be happy to share that with and and others who like I wouldn't dare kind show them that kind of stuff because you know they're the kind of customers who Peck at everything you know they'd be phoning you every 30 seconds saying it's it's gone 30 seconds more than it was yeah yeah exactly yeah those are the ones who pick urgent on every ticket right yeah yeah and then complain that it's breached SLA yeah yeah exactly it's like uh yeah you you just you forgot your password uh just here's a here's a link to reset it you're okay everything is gonna everything is GNA be okay the world is not ending you're you're fine yeah yeah um okay so what other options do we have uh so interestingly I see you've got um which I I never sort of really saw that property ID for the the talk Taw which is the kind of cheat facility but so I'm but that's built in right as part of the the portal so I'm assuming that means you can use that third party I think it's called talk. two isn't it um you can use that as part of this so does that replace the chat yeah in in yeah so um it just embeds the talk chat icon on top of the self service portal kind of like our existing chat already does um but yeah if you didn't want to use the Halo chat on the self-service portal then you could disable it in here and then put your talk ID in and then the talk ID The Talk Chat would pop up okay H right so I think for the sake of keeping the video a reasonable time um we might wrap things up there um just a brief introduction to the sort of configuration options oh one of one other point before before we wrap up um is we've had we've seen here and more specifically at the top uh where we have this configuration section we've seen how we can customize the selfservice portal uh to suit your own branding um I just want to highlight that you can change the branding options on a customer by customer basis and you can do that against the customer settings tab under override organization details so in here we also have uh the ability to change the portal theme to and to change the portal logo as well so and also change the portal home screen so you can basically change how a self-service portal looks based on the individual who's logging in to the self-service portal So based on the options in here this sets the theme uh based on our user permissions and our user roles that sets the level of access and then based on the configuration for our menu buttons uh we can have different menu buttons appear or not based on who's logged in and the outcome of those three points is a very unique self-service portal experience based on whoever's logging in um and so I think we'll I think we'll leave it there for this uh uh this session yeah we've just sort of had an introduction to souo Sport and we've looked at some of the ways that we can uh configure the look and feel of the of the portal and a couple of other miscellaneous options an introduction to end user permissions um of course a massive part of the configuration of the self-service portal is the service catalog um which we will have a look at in the next session absolutely and I think that's that's something that really excuse me that really kind of brings us into its own you know having the ability to kind of have those those service cataloges um and also you mentioned about the um uh the alerts or um I can't remember what we call them now um but you know we can check if there's a like oh the monitor yeah up time down time that kind of stuff yeah yeah yeah so maybe well I think what we'll do on the next video then is we'll cover off service catalog and we'll we'll cover off the monitors and see how those work and see how those can kind of get added to the to the end the portal absolutely yeah cool well um thank you so much again Morgan and I really appreciate it as always that uh that you're spending the time going through these um you know these videos have been massively helpful I know I've I know you've had a bunch of people who have um you know said how useful these were you know I'm I'm getting people all the time saying these videos are useful so really really appreciate your your help your input on these and you know as always appreciate that Halo is allowing us to do these because I think they um yeah they massively benefit everybody out there so thank you for your time and um we will see you on the next video yeah always a pleasure it was was good catching up and I'll see you on the next one yeah thanks bye