Hello everyone. First of all, sincerest apologies because this should have been started 15 minutes ago, we’ve been having some technical issues. Secondly, thanks for joining us today, if anyone’s dropped out, I completely understand. Thanks to those of you that are still here.
The purpose of this webinar today is twofold, we have just launched a new bolt-on, which is available for our business and service CRM customers, to enable you to provide access to your customers for all important documentation, through our new customer portals. The second part of that is, as our customers, and as we eat our own dog food and use our own software, we will also be giving you access as an end user, where you’ll be able to access any documentation that we send you, for example, invoices and other documents. So, we’re going to give you a quick run-through of what the portal admin side of things looks like for you, and what end users will be able to see as well. I’ve got my colleague Vicky, who is on the chat, so if you’ve got any questions feel free to send them through to Vicky. Vicky will also pop her email on the chat, if anyone wants to talk to us about getting the customer portal access so that you can provide this for your customers, please email Vicky directly, and we can arrange some time to go through that process and help you get that set up. I’m going to share my screen now and we’ll just take a look at what’s going on with the customer portals and how this works. This will be sat outside of Zigaflow, outside of your Zigaflow account, but it is connected to Zigaflow, we will run through this.
Let’s get started. Okay, so if you want to use the customer portals to provide your customers with documentation, you’ll be given your own admin portal for this, which is what I’m logging into now. When you log in here, this will allow you to set up different styles of customer portals. The idea behind that is that this will pull through documentation from different modules in the system, for instance, things like invoices. It will also pull through other information, for instance, if you’re using eForms for certificates or reports, that information can be pulled through as well. And again, there is a level of basic information coming through from the client asset module as well.
Now, the reason you can set up different sites or different portal styles, if you like, is that this allows you to control what information is being shown to customers. So, I’m just going to click in and edit one of these ones that are already here. You can see that you can name each one, and you can give it its own subdomain, so it’s got a unique URL that can be connected to your own web domain. Then once you’re in here, you can choose which of the modules you’d like to allow customers access to the documentation. These buttons along the bottom here reflect the statuses that you will have in each of those modules in your system. It allows you to select or deselect the specific statuses so that you determine what the end users can see.
Obviously, if you’re drafting up invoices, you’re probably not going to want the customer to see them. You are probably going to want them to see only if they’re sent or paid, for instance. This gives you the ability to configure that. Once you’ve named the site and set the structure of the portal up, then you can start adding in end users that you’d want to give access to that style of the portal. So, if I click on this add new button, this opens the customer or client information from your CRM. You can also use the customer tags that you might have on the system to look for a particular subset of customers who you might want to give access. So, we can see here that if I click on one of these customers, it’s not coming up with any contacts under that account, again this is a demo system, but If I click on one of these ones here, you can see that John Taylor Associates, the company, has also got John Taylor, individual, as a contact. So, this can work one of two ways, you will see there is an ‘add’ button up here, which will add the email address, if you’ve only got a single email address against the company record with no contacts underneath, this will allow you to add that email address as a login. If you do have contacts, you can add them as individuals under here as well. That’s basically how you assign the licences for the customers to access their own records. So, in terms of what that looks like for an end user, I’ll just log into this here. They would see this here, again if you’re using things like custom branding in the system, this can include your logo and the same background image that you would have on your login screen.
If you’re not familiar with the context of custom branding and you’re not using that currently, please feel free to get in contact with us and we can discuss that with you in a little bit more detail. So, I’m going to log in to this now, I’m logging in as one of your customers. Right, this is the area that your customer will see.
If you’ve created a portal style that’s only allowing them to see invoices at this point, they’re only going to see invoices on there. This style that we’ve set out in this portal has got more information, so you get more information here. This will carry your logo onto the portal. This would be potentially your custom subdomain, that they access via. This other logo here, which is looking rather random, is a logo that is stored against the customer record in the CRM as well. This just means it gives you an opportunity to co-brand the portal that your customers will be accessing with your logo and their logo as well. So, you’ve got two navigation options here, you have the menu along the top and we’ve also got these titles as well, which can take you through the different areas. For instance, if I wanted to click on the invoices, you’ll see there’s a little bit of a familiar-looking feel as to what you're in the main Zigaflow system. You can see they’ve got the invoices here; they’ve got the filters on the left so they can choose between what’s been sent and what’s been paid.
There are also additional filters here as well which can be applied so that you can use these on each of the individual columns to look for information, just to further filter that out as well. Again, if you wanted to look for one specific invoice number, you can do that here. Your customers will be able to filter that out and look for a specific invoice in this system. You can see the download button here which will allow them to download the invoice in the exact same format it was when it was sent to them. What you’ll also find, which is incredibly useful, especially if you’re dealing with customers who are used to sending you things like purchase order documents, is when you click on this ‘plus’ button, it will bring up any of the shareable attachments that you’ve got against that invoice record. If your customer has provided you with a PDF purchase order to correlate with the invoice and you’ve added that to the side of the shareable attachment on the attachments tab, that would be present here as well.
So, your customer would be able to access the invoice and see the correlating purchase order document, it’s evidence all tied up together in one place. That is fundamentally what your customers are going to be able to see. The idea behind this is one of the things we hear customers talking about a lot when it comes to invoices, if it is people requesting copies of invoices, or saying invoices haven’t arrived by email, this then allows you to take a different approach to customers. It doesn’t have to be all your customers, it could be a set or a small quorum of your customer base, whereby they will now have access to all of the invoices. There will be no more calls to the accounts department asking for copies of invoices, not to say that people do, but there’ll be none of these calls saying, ‘I’m sorry we’ve not paid your invoice because we didn’t have a copy of it.
Now you’ll be able to give them the keys to this, so they’ve got all the key documents that you want them to be able to access at any given time. That’s really the fundamentals of what this is there for. This is the first instance, the first launch of this new portal. As many of you are aware, we don’t sit still when it comes to bringing developments to the forefront, so we have already got plans in place for the development of the customer portal, to enable you to have a much more joined-up relationship with the way that you work with customers. As always, we welcome people’s feedback on what this is doing. Just to reiterate, you, as customers of ours, will have access to this, which we will be providing you with in due course, so that you’ll be able to access key documentation that we have in relation to our relationship with you. This is an additional bolt onto the business and service CRM. If you want to provide this for your customers, we’ve developed a very simple pricing structure on the customer portal package, which is allowing you ten end-user logins for £50 a month.
An end user login is not a customer, that could be you’ve got one customer with ten people you want to access portals. It could be 10 customers each with one contact that you want to give access to, the pricing is based on having a block of ten end user allocations that you can share out with customers. Again, that just allows you to, rather than looking at this for all of everybody, do it in incremental steps. The reason this does have a price attached to it, and I’m sure everyone will understand and appreciate this, is that this is something which we have running on servers from our side.
The more customers access, the more of ‘your end-user customers access the servers, which has an impact on the amount of server space required. This is running on new separate servers; this covers working with us on future development and rolling out new features too. That is it with regard to the customer portals.
If you want to get in contact with us, if you want any more information or if you’ve got any specific questions about this as well, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Thank you very much for joining!