The customer portal provides an external view of all relevant tickets to each of your customer organizations. This allows them to see a real time view of all tickets in one place, understand their current state, or historical state, and reduce duplication. They can take action on a ticket to help move it forward and participate in conversations linked to a ticket.
Required settings
You’ll need to have a Help Center custom domain, Cookie Forwarding, and Identity Verification set up before enabling the customer portal . Read our customer portal required settings before getting started.
How it works
The customer portal is built into your Intercom Help Center and enables specified logged in users to view tickets associated with companies they are a member of. By default, users can see all tickets associated with their company. With ticket visibility conditions, you can restrict specific users to seeing only tickets they created, while others continue to see all company tickets.
You can search, filter, and sort tickets to quickly find what you’re looking for.
To search for tickets, enter a keyword in the search bar at the top. Search matches ticket titles, descriptions, IDs, and every customer-visible reply and message in the ticket. Internal notes are never included in search results. Results are ranked by match location — title first, then description, then conversation content.
To filter tickets, use the filters at the top of the portal. You can filter by ticket type, state, created or updated date, and creator.
To sort tickets, click on a column header in the ticket table. You can sort by ticket ID, type, state, created on, or last updated.
When searching, a Preview column appears in the ticket list showing the best-matching snippet from each result, with the search term highlighted in context, plus the author's name and a relative timestamp (for example, "3d" or "now"). Teammates can turn the Preview column on or off in Settings > Help Center > Customer Portal — it's on by default.
Note:
There is currently no constraint on the width for tables displayed in the Customer portal . This means tables may extend beyond the viewport depending on the number of columns and content. Our Product team is aware of this feedback and taking it into consideration for future improvements.
The Customer portal table has fixed columns (ticket ID, type, state, created on, and last updated). Custom ticket attributes — even those set to be "Visible to customer" — can't currently be added as columns in the portal table. The only place a custom attribute will show for a customer is on the ticket submission form, if the customer creates the ticket themselves and the attribute is visible to them.
Selecting a ticket will show the ticket details (i.e. status, ticket ID, ticket type, description etc.).
Clicking the Send us a message button allows users to open and join the linked conversation to view more context. This opens directly in the Messenger. If the user is not already participating in the conversation, they have the option to click Join conversation.
Once they join a conversation, the ticket will be added to the tickets space in the Messenger, enabling them to see all tickets they create or participate in.
How customers can access the portal
Depending on the configuration setup - there are three ways for customers to access the ticket portal.
Customer portal card in Help Centre
The tickets space provides a banner link at the top for easy access back to the customer portal main page
Lastly, customers can directly access the portal with a URL. This URL is generated in the Articles settings. See more Share the customer portal URL.
In order to access the customer portal , users will need:
an email address associated with their user profile.
a company associated with their user profile.
at least one ticket associated with that company.
Without the above, users will not be able to visit the customer portal via the Help Center, tickets space banner or URL.
Associate tickets with companies
Tickets can be associated with companies when creating new tickets, updating existing tickets, converting a conversation to a ticket, or linking a ticket to a conversation.
Simply select a company from the dropdown menu in the top panel of the ticket information. The options in this dropdown will list all companies that are currently associated to the user(s) participating in the ticket.
Note:
If a user is a member of exactly one company that company will be automatically selected. You can deselect it by choosing the No company option.
Users with more than one company will have No company automatically selected and you must choose which company you want to associate the ticket with.
Note: For a ticket to appear in the Customer portal , it must have a company assigned. If a user is associated with multiple companies or none, a teammate must manually select the correct company in the ticket details. Once assigned, the ticket will be visible in the portal within a few minutes.
Filter Inbox search results by company
Teammates triaging or working on a new ticket can use Inbox search and filter by Company to check for duplicate tickets already raised.
The Company column can also be added to your table view which displays the associated company record for each ticket.
Note: for more on how the Company search filter works for both Tickets and Conversations, see Inbox search and filter article
Tickets tab in company profile page
All tickets related to the company are shown in the 'Tickets' tab within the company profile page.
Get started
After you’ve checked the customer portal required settings, you can go ahead and complete the customer portal setup.
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