Customer portal roles, groups, and access control

Overview

Access to your customer portal is governed by three things working together: who a person is (their role and group membership), what they're allowed to see (article visibility and ticket ownership), and whether they're allowed to log in at all (your login access policy). This article explains each layer so you can give the right customers the right access.

Customer roles

The portal has two levels of customer role:

• Verified customers — can log in and see the tickets they created (where they are listed in the ticket's Reported by field).
• Customer admins — can log in and see not only their own tickets but all tickets raised by other users from their organization. You can assign multiple customer admins per customer organization.

Only verified users can log in to the portal.

To designate a customer admin, go to Settings > User management > Groups > Customer Admins, select Add User, and search for the customer.

Ticket visibility: the Reported by rule

For a ticket to appear in a customer's portal view, that customer must be listed in the ticket's Reported by field. A ticket created through another channel (email, chat, an agent) will not show up for a customer in the portal unless they are set as Reported by — even if they originally raised the request. Customer admins are the exception: they see all of their organization's tickets regardless of who reported each one.

Article visibility (audience scopes)

Every knowledge base article has a Visible to setting that controls which audience can read it:

• Customers — visible to everyone, including anonymous visitors, but only if the public portal is enabled. If the public portal is off, only signed-in (verified) customers can view it.
• Verified Customers — visible only to customers who are signed in to the portal.
• Customer Admins — visible only to members of the Customer Admins group.
• A custom customer group — you can create your own customer groups and set an article's visibility to a specific group. When you do this, only users who belong to that group can log in and view the article. Any other user — whether signed in (a verified customer outside the group) or a public/logged-out visitor — will not be able to see the article. Use this to restrict sensitive or segment-specific content to exactly the customers who should have it.

Leave Visible to blank to keep an article internal (not visible to any external audience). Set this per article to match its intended audience.

Tip: Create and manage custom customer groups under Settings > User management > Groups, then assign the relevant customers to the group. The group then becomes selectable in an article's Visible to field.