Brand your customer portal and help center
5 min
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:
- Describe the relationship between the customer portal and the help center
- Brand your help center
- Brand your customer portal
What’s the difference between the customer portal and the help center?
The help center makes it easy for customers to find the help they need in one place.
A help center is an online website for customers to browse portals and read help articles.
A portal is where customers go to get help for specific service spaces.
Portals contain knowledge base articles that customers can use to help themselves and request forms that they can use to get support from agents.
👇 Here’s an example of a help center’s structure.
👉 For example: Acme Plumbing has one help center for its company. To help customers find what they need and filter requests to the appropriate queue, they set up several different portals within the help center. These portals include plumbing and drains, air conditioning, heating, and electrical services. Within each portal, customers can read helpful articles related to these topics. They can also submit a request if they need support from an agent.
“Customer portal” and “portal” are used interchangeably. Portals are also referred to as “service desks.”
Customize your help center and portal
By customizing the help center and portal, you can ensure that your customers see all the relevant information they need at the right places while delivering a consistent brand experience.
Jira admins, service space admins, and agents have different abilities when it comes to branding the portal.
👇 Click the tabs below to learn how each role can customize the help center and customer portals.
Jira admins can brand the help center and the customer portal. They can also add announcements to the customer portal.
Raise requests using a widget
You can add widget to any website you control so that your customers can raise requests using it.
Before you add a widget make sure you’ve set up an open portal.
If you want customers to access knowledge base articles from the widget, make sure you’ve set the Who can view permission to Anyone.
Create and customize your widget:
- From your service space, select Space settings, select Channels & self service, then select Widget.
- Choose if you want to use the virtual service agent in the widget.
- Select your widget’s Default request type.
- If you see an error saying the request type isn’t valid, it means the request type has a required field that can’t be rendered in the widget.
- Customize your widget’s appearance and any standard messages.
- Select Save.
Any changes to the widget are automatically reflected everywhere the widget is embedded.
Steps to embed the widget on your website:
- From your service space, select Space settings, select Channels & self service, then select Widget.
- Select Embed code.
- Copy and paste the generated code on your web page(s).
Brand the help center
Jira admins manage announcements and messages, and they customize your help center's branding and layout.
To customize the help center:
- In the upper-right corner of Jira, click the Settings icon (represented by a gear), then select Jira apps.
- In the sidebar, locate the Jira Service Management section, and select Configuration from the sidebar.
- On the Jira Service Management configuration page, locate Help center management, and select View all help centers.
- Select your help center.
- In the upper right of the Help center window, expand Customize. Here you can find all of the customizable options available.
👇 Click the boxes below to see the help center customization options.
👇 Watch this video to see how to customize the look and feel of the help center.
Only Jira admins can customize the help center.
Brand the customer portal
Jira admins brand the customer portal. Service space admins brand the customer portal for their service spaces.
You can rename your customer portal and add a logo so customers can easily associate this service space with your team and organization when they create requests.
Optionally, you can add introduction text to familiarize customers with your service space.
👇 Watch this video to see how to brand the customer portal.
For more ways to brand your help center and customer portal, view Atlassian Documentation.