Take a Tour of HelpSpot's comprehensive, user-oriented Features.

HelpSpot Tour: The Portal

1. Simple Navigation

A simple navigation system means your customers won't become frustrated trying to find the help they need. By highlighting the forum and knowledge book resources, the navigation provides the customer an opportunity to solve problems on their own.

2. Support Homepage

The portal homepage defaults to any highlighted knowledge book pages, the most recent forum topics, as well as the knowledge book pages customers have marked as most helpful. Of course, you can also customize this to meet your organizations specific needs.

3. Searching

Integrated full text searching of the forums and knowledge books allows HelpSpot to work well with your existing website and intranet crawler-based search.

Fully Customizable

The self-service portal is fully templated and easily customizable into the look and feel of your website.

Submitting a Request

A. Customer Emails

Customers who provide an email address will receive updates on their request. When HelpSpots email integration is configured customer responses to updates, done either through email or the portal, will be included as part of the request history.

B. Custom Fields

By default the request form asks if the request is urgent. You can elect to make your installations custom fields live on the portal.

C. Default Request Questions

Rather than have just one text area for the customer to describe the request, HelpSpot defaults to asking a series of three questions to structure the submission. These questions help define the issue and minimize the back and forth for additional information. Note: you can switch this to one, traditional text box if you prefer.

D. Document Uploading

So customers can provide supporting documentation, you can opt to allow the document upload feature. For added security, HelpSpot allows administrators to specify the file times not allowed.

E. SPAM Security

Using a captcha (security word required prior to submitting) HelpSpot greatly reduces the number of SPAM requests submitted.

Checking on a Request

HelpSpot's portal gives customers the option to check the status of a single request or log-in to easily view the status of all requests, from one page.

Logged-in View

Once customers log-in, they'll be presented with a complete list of all requests they have within the system. From here they can click the linked request ID to enter the individual request for checking/updating, as shown below.

Individual Request View

A. Request History

A full history of all public notes in the request is available to the customer.

B. Update Form

Customers can easily supply additional information and updates through the update form.

We've looked at the Knowledge Books and Forums as a HelpSpot staff member (see the KB and Forum sections of this tour), now let's take a look at these features as a customer using the self-service portal.

Knowledge Books

The straightforward layout of the table of contents makes it easy for customers to navigate to the exact information they need, with your highlighted pages clearly indicated.

Within each page of any knowledge book, users can rate the helpfulness.

Forums

An integrated, easy to use, forum system lets you create a community of customers to share insight and information that can serve as a learning opportunity for those looking for answers. RSS feeds and email subscriptions allow customers to track forum discussions without needing to manually check the forums.

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