Check that you have met these prerequisites before setting up the customer portal.
Use this article to enable and configure the Customer Portal for your Help Center. You'll learn how to turn on the portal, set up access permissions to control who can view it, configure ticket visibility conditions, and make the portal discoverable to your customers.
Enable the customer portal in Help Center
Once you've enabled all the prerequisite settings, you can turn on the Customer Portal in your Help Center by navigating to Settings > Helpdesk > Tickets > Tickets Portal.
Scroll down to the Enable customer portal toggle and turn it on.
An error message will be shown if you try to toggle this on before enabling the customer portal prerequisites.
Configure access permissions
Add access permissions by setting audience rules (filters based on user or company profile data) to define which of your users can access the portal. Click + Add new and segment users by selecting from Person or Company data attributes.
For example, you might segment by "Email contains examply.com" for all users with that company email address. The preview shows which users match this audience rule.
The preview is dynamic and dependent on the rules you selected. Only users who are included in the selected audience rules will be able to access the portal through the three methods.
Ticket visibility
You can control whether customers see every ticket linked to their company or only the tickets they created personally. To manage this, navigate to Settings > Helpdesk > Tickets > Tickets Portal and locate the Ticket visibility section.
The following table shows how the toggle and conditions interact to determine what each customer sees:
Toggle | Conditions | What customers see |
Off | Any (preserved but inactive) | Everyone sees all company tickets |
On | None | Everyone is restricted to their own tickets only |
On | Conditions set | Users matching conditions see only their own tickets; everyone else sees all company tickets |
Notes:
This setting only applies to the Customer Portal. It has no effect on the Messenger or the tickets displayed within the Messenger space.
When the toggle is on with conditions set, only users matching those conditions are restricted. All other users continue to see all company tickets.
Set visibility conditions
The Ticket visibility toggle in Settings > Helpdesk > Tickets > Tickets Portal supports attribute-based conditions that restrict specific users to seeing only their own tickets. When the toggle is on, follow these steps to configure conditions:
Navigate to Settings > Helpdesk > Tickets > Tickets Portal and locate the Ticket visibility card.
Toggle on visibility.
Click + Add condition and select an attribute (such as email, name, or a custom attribute).
Set the condition value. Users matching this condition will only see tickets they created.
Click Preview users to see how many users currently match your conditions and confirm the right people are being restricted.
Save your changes.
Important: Conditions define who is restricted — not who has access. This is the opposite of how Access Permissions work on the same page. A user matching a condition sees only their own tickets; a user who doesn't match continues to see all company tickets.
Note: Toggling visibility off preserves your saved conditions — they become inactive but aren't deleted. Toggling back on re-applies the same conditions.
What customers see in the portal
What customers see in the portal depends on whether they match the visibility conditions:
Unrestricted users see both an All tab (all company tickets) and a Created by me tab.
Restricted users (those matching the conditions) see only a Created by me tab.
Preview column
When customers search the portal, 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"). This is on by default.
To turn it off, go to Settings > Help Center > Ticket Portal and toggle off Preview column.
Configure portal discovery
Now you're ready to share the Customer Portal with the users you've defined in your access permissions.
Share the Customer Portal URL
Enabling the Customer Portal automatically generates a Customer portal URL which you can share directly with your companies and users.
Add the Customer Portal card to your Help Center
Once the Customer Portal is turned on, the Customer Portal card is added to the homepage of your Help Center.
This can be enabled or disabled from Settings > Help Center > Configure. Click on the Styling tab and scroll down to Layout and sections then toggle on/off the "Customer portal section".
Note: This section cannot be edited — only shown/hidden and moved up/down the list of Spaces.
This card can be reordered on the homepage by using the drag and drop tool next to each section.
Click Save and set live to save these changes and add the customer portal card to your Help Center.
Enable the tickets space
If you've enabled the tickets space in your Messenger settings, users will automatically see a banner linking back to the customer portal from the top of the tickets space.
How to test your Customer Portal setup
Step 1: Identify a user
Select a user that has an account in your web application.
Ensure that the login credentials for that user are available as it will be necessary to login as the user.
Step 2: Check data associations
Step 3: Check access conditions
Ensure that the user selected has access.
Step 4: Login and test
Important:
The Customer Portal is designed to show only Customer tickets that are shared with the customer.
The Customer Portal is not currently supported on mobile devices.
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