Customer portal - Knowledge base

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The customer portal / knowledgebase stores your knowledge base articles, forum posts, feedback, and suggestions from your customers. It supports your customers even when your agents are offline.
 
Every LiveAgent installation comes with a sample Customer portal that you can fully customize. An example of such a customer portal is our index page.

Create an additional Customer Portal

As mentioned above, there is always one Knowledgebase / Customer portal included in each plan. If you wish to have more than just one, you can create another by clicking on the "Create customer portal" button. Each additional knowledge base is for $19/month. In the Overview part, you will be able to see all customer portals that you have created. More information about Multi Knowledgebase can be found here.
 

Configuration

Navigate to Customer portal > General > Settings and click on the 'Settings' (gear wheel icon) button in the Configuration part.
 
 
A new window will open up where you can change the favicon, logo, title, select theme, define colors, insert own HTML and custom CSS or add tracking codes.

Changing Logo and Title

In the General Settings section, you can set the Favicon and Logo of your customer portal as well as define the Title.

Changing the theme

In the Design section, you can select a theme for the customer portal: Classic, Minimalist, or Montana. You can customize each of those. 

Changing colors

In the Color section, you can customize colors of:
  • Header
  • Main action button
  • Main action button - Hover
  • Secondary action button
  • Secondary action button - Hover
  • Footer 
  • Search box
  • Category icon
  • Article icon
  • Item color
  • Title color

Inserting own header or footer

To insert HTML code to header and footer in your customer portal, navigate to Design > Own HTML section. 
If you should want to keep the default footer in the Montana theme but customize it to match your needs then you can follow this article.

CSS customization

Navigate to the Design > Custom CSS section to insert your CSS code.

Inserting tracking codes

In the Tracking codes section you can add your codes:
  • After <HEAD>
  • Before </HEAD>
  • After <BODY>

This can be helpful if you would like to use a code from 3rd party application on the customer portal (like Google Analytics) or for example to insert a call button from LiveAgent on the customer portal, etc. 

 
 
If you navigate back to the Customer Portal settings, there are two more parts - Submit ticket and Start chat
 
Submit ticket
 
By enabling the Submit ticket you will give your customers an option to contact you and submit a ticket directly from your customer portal. After clicking on the customize icon, a new window will open up.
 
If you wish to disable authentication so that anyone with a unique ticket link (hard to guess and provided only in replies sent to the customer) is able to see the details of this ticket, then you can uncheck the Require authentication. If you want everyone to log in in order to access the tickets, check the "Require authentication" box. 
Under "Settings", you can also customize the "Submit ticket" contact form and set the fields it should contain. 
 
Start chat
 
If you enable this option, you will allow your visitors to start a chat via the built-in 'Start chat' button when replying to the ticket in the 'My tickets' section that is described below. By clicking on the "Customize" icon, you will be able to customize the design of the chat window and to set its language.
 
My tickets
 
This section allows your customers to see and work with their own tickets. Login/registration is required to access the "My tickets" section so the customer has to create an account by registering directly through the website or can use their Facebook account to log in.

They can see their tickets on the list after clicking on "My tickets" when they are logged in the customer portal. They are able to open any ticket, reply to it (email), start a chat as described above. They can also see a ticket ID for each ticket. 
 

Managing content of your Customer portal / Knowledgebase

After you applied the desired settings regarding Knowledgebase, it is time to manage its content. To do so, you need to click on the actual knowledge base, in our case it is General. 
 
 
Adding content
 
By selecting an option from the drop-down menu you can create:
  • Article
  • Category
  • Forum
  • Suggestion category

It is very important to think of the structure you wish to have, so it is convenient to create different categories for different products or services that your company provides. 

 
 
 
Creating categories
 
By choosing "Category", you will see a screen like this one:
 
As you may see, you can choose from the list of existing categories under which the category you are creating will be placed. 
You can also set the desired title that will be a part of the hyperlink by which the customers will be able to access the particular category. 
You can choose, whether the category (and all the articles in it) will be publicly available or should remain an internal article visible only to your agents working in the agent panel. 
After you click the 'Create' button, you will see the exact link by which the particular category can be reached.
 
Adding, editing articles
 
Once you have some categories created, it is time to place some content there so that you can provide all the convenient information to your customers. 
From the options of the 'Create' button choose "Article" and you will  see a screen like this:
 
 
As you may see, it provides a full-featured WYSIWYG editor, while it also provides the option to switch to HTML edit mode by clicking the Source. 
An article also has the options to be "Internal" (visible only to agents) or "Public" (visible to all customers).
When you are writing/modifying an article, it is convenient to set its status to "Draft". Once the article is ready and you want to check it out publicly, set it to "Published" (do not forget to click save) and feel free to click the link that appears directly under the title (the system automatically generates it).
 
Creating a forum
 
By choosing "Forum" after clicking the 'Create' button, you will get a screen like this:
 
Most of the parts are the same as if creating a category, however, you have there also a "Department" field, where you choose the desired department that should handle the forum entries.
 
Creating a Suggestion category

Its creation is the very same as creating a Forum described above.