Salesforce Features
Customer Portal
Where Your Customers Meet Your Company
- Put more power behind your customer self-service strategy
- Enable entirely new self-service processes
- Provide differentiated service to different customers and segments
- Completely customize your portal with the Apex platform
With Spring ’07, salesforce.com introduces a powerful, new customer portal to step up the self-service experience for your customers. The new customer portal enables you to fully exploit the capabilities of the Web as the ideal channel to deliver superior self-service while at the same lowering the cost of serving your customers. Because the customer portal is 100-percent hosted by salesforce.com just like the Salesforce application itself, you get the same service delivery benefits and none of the maintenance and infrastructure headaches that come with hosting a portal yourself.
This feature is
available in LIMITED RELEASE to Enterprise and Unlimited Editions; Requires an Additional Fee.
Training, Documentation, & Best Practices
- Release Notes (PDF)
- Customer Portal Implementation Guide (PDF)
Feature Details
- User Interface: The full power of Salesforce’s award-winning user interface is available to your customers in the customer portal. Popular capabilities such as advanced search, quick create, and recently used items create a superior customer experience. You can also personalize the UI for each user or user group so your customers are presented with the precise information they need.
- Advanced Case Management and Knowledge Base: In addition to logging and viewing cases, you can now allow your customers to edit or even close their cases, search for cases, and associate cases to existing assets. Portal users can also search and browse for rich content solutions in your knowledge base.
- Documents: Provide access to product documentation and other relevant documents to your customers with folders and document search in the portal.
- Custom Objects and Tabs: Create and deliver entirely new self-service processes—going well beyond cases and solutions— with custom objects and tabs. You can expose custom objects and tabs created in Salesforce to your customers in the customer portal to meet the unique customer service and support requirements of your organization and your industry.
- Portal List Views: You can define columns and filters for case and custom object list views so that your customers can sort lists and quickly find the information they are seeking.
- Multiple User Profiles and Record Types: Provide a personalized experience to different accounts and customer segments using configurable portal user profiles and record types.
- Account Role Hierarchy and Sharing: You can use a three-level role hierarchy inside each customer account to give executive and manager-level users access to data owned by users below them in the hierarchy. In addition, you can create sharing rules to allow portal users to share data with other users.
- Branding and Style Configuration: You can quickly brand your customer portal by customizing the home page, header, and footer as well as changing the portal colors and fonts with an easy-to-use style editor.
- Unlimited Customization: The power of the Apex platform gives you greater flexibility to extend the same advanced capabilities that are available to you in the Salesforce application to your customers via the portal. All the advanced customization and extension features of the Apex platform—including s-controls, custom buttons, mash-ups, and much more—are available to help you provide a streamlined experience to your customers.
Note: The customer portal is a fee-based license option that is scheduled to be available for Enterprise and Unlimited Edition customers on a limited basis in the weeks following the release of Spring ’07. To request access to the customer portal during the limited release, please contact your technical support representative or customer success manager. The customer portal is scheduled to be generally available in a future Salesforce release (after Spring ’07).
24 Comments
February 26
We run professional edition for case management. I have raised cases asking for the self service portal to be improved as we currently have to provide our customers with weekly data in Excel to allow them to manage the cases they are raising.
Why will this feature not be available for professional edition. Is this a cynical marketing exercise?
February 26
Hi Paul
Thanks for your comment. The reason the Customer Portal is not available in Professional Edition is actually for technical reasons. One of major requirements we got from customers was the ability to personalize the portal for different accounts and user segments. The only way we could do this was to leverage Profiles (a EE and UE feature) as the basis of the architecture. This is the reason why it’s only available for EE and UE customers. I would really like to understand the issues you have with the current self service portal. I have sent you an e-mail to see if we can set up a time to do this.
Kind regards,
Chet Chauhan
Senior Product Manager, Service & Support
Salesforce.com
February 26
The Customer Portal is a great idea, but the one component I see it lacking is Dashboards.
Dashboards are sexy. It's the first thing that my Users start drooling over when I start expanding on the powers and usefulness of Salesforce.com.
Give me the ability to create and include Dashboards in the Customer Portal and I'll be able to sell that to my Customers (and thereby by lots of Customer Portal licenses).
Without dashboards, we'll most likely need to spend a lot of in-house development resources bulding and hosting our own customer portal.
February 27
This looks exactly what people have been asking us for, the ability to raise cases uses different record types is great
February 27
We have EE and right now we use the Self Service Portal to give support to our customers...
In the Note says: "The customer portal is a fee-based license option"...
This mean that once Spring 07 is released we have to pay to continue using the Self Service/Customer portal??...
February 27
I second Paul's comment - we use PE for the portal for our IT helpdesk cases. We were looking forward to the portal expansion to include custom objects, as we do bug tracking, project tracking and other things in our database that we'd like to make available thru the portal. And the dashboards, definitely. We don't much care about the Role/Profile issues with the portal.
February 27
Hi Aureliano
The new Customer Portal is a completely different product to the existing self-service portal and you won't have to pay to continuing using the existing portal. The new Customer Portal will have a fee associated to it.
Kind regards,
Chet Chauhan
Senior Product Manager, Service & Support Salesforce.com
February 27
Chet,
Thanks a lot for your answer... Is going to be a trial for the customer portal, so we can decide to keep using the current Self Service Portal or to pay to use the new Customer Portal??... There are migration issues we need to consider in case we want to change??
February 28
Is the following functionality will be possible in the new portal:
We have Account hierarchy. I want that the accounts that are "father" account will be able to open caese through the portal to their "son" accounts or "grandson" accounts, using their own username and password only. Example: Distributor is an account in my SF and his End User is also an account in my SF. I want to enable the distributor to open cases, through the portal, in the name of the End user but from the dist's username and pass.
Will it be possible?
February 28
Will there be the opportunity to be able to run BOTH the new and the old self service portal in parallel. Since there is a fee involved. We might be able to charge some portal users for this functionality, but still be able to offer a more basic portal to the others for free as we do today.
February 28
I don't know if this is right forum. I was also looking for a print button in the self-service portal? Has anybody requested this enhancement. Lot of our clients work out of self service portal and they were asking for a print or export option.
February 28
I wondered if the existing self-service support portal will be upgraded/enhanced in any way, or will this stay as-is, and if any additional functionality is required, then the customer portal should be used instead ? If so, then it appears that you are almost forcing us to move to the fee based customer support portal so we can provide better service to our customers, rather than enhancing the base self-service functionality as new releases of SFDC are released.
I am also interested to know if it is possible to configure a 'software download' facility into the customer portal or the self-service portal so that our customers can download latest versions of products which they are licensed to use, as well as patches/fixes/release notes etc. If this was provided in standard customer portal then it might be worth paying for !
March 6
One of the most important features for a great CRM (customer relationship)
March 8
I have to concur with Paul, we actually have the same process of sending Excel sheets to our clients weekly to give them an open issue report, since the current self service portal does not have any sorting/searching abilities. Is there any plan to expand the functionality of the current portal, or is the development of that part of the webapp dead now that there is an expanded version for PE and EE customers? I really can't cost justify the upgrade to another edition for improved functionality of the portal.
March 8
Actually, we are a PE customer, (previous comment meant "EE and UE", not "PE and EE."
March 19
Hi guys,
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not sure why this is being advertised. I've spoken to the sales guys in the US and UK and they're telling me it's not for sale!?
So the question is: who's hand do I have to shake (in the right way) to get this on our enterprise system? Also, can someone tell me how much it costs? Please! I've never had to beg a company to spend money with them...
Cheers,
Steve
April 2
Chet,
If you could drop me a line at some point to discuss further functionality of the Prof. edit self service portal, it would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Mike
April 9
Hi,
Will these new features be available for organizations that receive licenses through the Salesforce Foundation. If so, how do we go about taking advantage of these features?
We love you,
Gary
April 14
Hi,
I have been looking forward to the upgraded self service portal. But I am disappointed that I have to upgrade to EE or UE to avail the new features.
I have been evaluating to a partner, Talisma, that I like so far. At an additional $500 a month, I can get a fully functional knowledge base. But this option is sub-optimal since I have standardized my case management within SFDC.
Also, it is sad to hear that you guys have restricted access only to optimize for a role based portal personalization option. I thought SaaS is all about making options configurable :(
-Sundeep
April 24
If Salesforce is making a play into the Online Self-Service market, AppSpace is not offering the value that others deliver. The lack of administrative reports on search patterns and failed searches is crippling to anyone trying to actively improve their service with BI. At the price that it's been rumored ($995/month according to http://www.crmnewsreview.com/crm/salesforcecom-unveils-appspace/#more-47) it's comparable in price to Talisma but lacks major features that only expensive amounts of customization could replicate.
June 21
Do you have plans for a user forum? Where they can post things like questions and ideas?
THanks!
June 26
The unanswered question posted above by Mike Fuller is the same question I have:
Will the new SSP have the ability to deliver reports on case activity?
Ideally, a custom report (or reports) could be defined by the admin and made public in the SSP with the account filter defined by the logged on user.
Either display in web tables with right click to CSV or direct export as CSV.
This feature alone would save countless hours of labor for most SF Support customers and would make the new portal easy to sell.
Without it, I don't understand why anyone would buy it.
July 20
I am still disapointed that you need to pay for the SSP.
We use the EE, and currently at the price per user per year we already pay thousands of dollars for SF. Why do we need to pay more to upgrade the SSP?
This is a road that SF is taking , and is not looking nice. Next, there will be a new account management feature, where you will have a feature not avail today, and you will need to pay/choose which version you want to use.
The appexchange is already a money sucking system, and having SF jion this venture is not to my taste.
just my penny.
July 23
As other's have noted, it's extremely difficult to cost justify this addition (overall, out of the question).
If this were "reasonably" priced by the user/agent, it would make so much more sense and would fit right into the Salesforce model. Instead, this puts the burden on the client user as an additional cost that is re-purposed back to them. With the "standard" edition of the customer portal (for just 5 users at a sample of 25 of our customers) - we'd almost being paying double what we do for all our users/agents on salesforce.
As others have stated, there are already products on the market that are considerably cheaper and have more functionality included (just missing the integration with custom SF objects).