Is it possible to only show the search bar in the portal?

Isabell Stahl

We want to reduce the amount of created tickets via the portal by forcing the users to search for their issue before creating a new ticket. 

Currently, the user can instantly create a ticket because the Create buttons are already available:

Is it possible to only display the Search bar?

Mike Bowen

Hi @Isabell Stahl 

No, you can't just have the search bar,  but what you can do is the following: 

Add categories to your knowledge base posts which will force your portal to show the knowledge base posts under their categories first. This won't eliminate your customer from logging a request, but it will funnel them into the knowledge base first and if the answer is not found it will give them some requests to choose from. 

Failing that, make the process of raising a request harder. Create more mandatory fields on your form, make it a pain to raise a request, but whatever you do, do not offer email requests, because customers will bypass the customer portal all together and raise requests via email, which is even worse. 

If I may point out, the above suggestion is is a worst case scenario. You don't want to hack off your customer with an over complicated request form.

It would be better to talk to them and ask them to look through the knowledge base first and if they can't find the help then to raise a request. You must take into account that not everyone has time to do searches (humans are lazy, they'll take the easiest route to less hassle), so you need to provide these lazy users with better options to find the solution.

 

-Mike