The customer portal provides an external view of all relevant tickets and conversations for each of your customer organizations. Customers get a real-time view of everything in one place so they can check the current or historical state of a ticket, track their open conversations, and take action to help move things forward.
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 and conversations associated with companies they are a member of. By default, users can see all tickets and conversations associated with their company. With visibility conditions, you can restrict specific users to seeing only the tickets or conversations they created.
The portal has three views (All, Tickets, and Conversations) selectable from the view selector at the top of the portal. All is the default landing view for first-time visitors and shows tickets and conversations in a single combined list.
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.
Viewing tickets and conversations
The portal's view selector lets customers switch between three views: All, Tickets, and Conversations.
All: the default view for first-time visitors. Shows a combined list of tickets and conversations. Columns display the union of ticket and conversation fields; an em-dash (—) fills cells that don't apply to a given row's type. A single status filter covers both ticket and conversation states, so customers can filter without knowing which type they're looking for. Clicking a row routes automatically: tickets open the ticket detail page, conversations open in the Messenger.
Tickets: shows only tickets. To search, enter a keyword in the search bar at the top. Search matches ticket titles, descriptions, IDs, and every customer-visible reply and message. To filter, use the filters at the top of the portal to filter by ticket type, state, created or updated date, and creator. To sort, click a column header to sort by ticket ID, type, state, created on, or last updated.
Conversations: shows only conversations. To search, enter a keyword in the search bar. Search matches the full body of a conversation, so customers can find a past thread by what was actually discussed. Clicking a conversation opens the Messenger directly on that thread.
How customers can access the portal
Depending on the configuration setup - there are three ways for customers to access the portal.
Customer portal card in Help Center.
The tickets space in the Messenger 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.
Note: 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
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.
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.
Teammates triaging or working on a new ticket can use Inbox search and filter by Company to check for duplicate tickets already raised.
Tickets tab in company profile page
All tickets related to the company are shown in the 'Tickets' tab within the company profile page.
Send a customer portal link from a macro
You can insert a customer portal URL variable into any macro or saved reply to send customers a direct link to their ticket or conversation in the portal — no manual link-building required.
To add the variable, open the macro composer, click the variable picker, and search for customer portal URL.
The variable is resolved at the moment the macro is used — not when it's authored — so it always points to the correct customer and ticket.
How the link resolves
Ticket conversation: resolves to a direct link to that specific ticket's page in the portal.
Non-ticket conversation shown in the portal: resolves to the company's portal list page (non-ticket conversations don't have their own portal page).
Conversation not viewable in the portal: resolves to an empty string; nothing is inserted into the message.
Note:
The customer portal URL variable is only available on workspaces with the customer Portal enabled. If the customer portal isn't enabled on your workspace, the variable won't appear in the picker and resolves to an empty string if used anyway.
On multi-brand workspaces, link resolution uses the workspace's default help center site. A conversation tied to a non-default brand currently resolves to the default brand's custom domain.
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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