Salesforce customer portal allows you to utilize great tools that are available in the internet as an effective self-service channel and at the same time a customer service base that is low in cost. In order to set up and customize the Salesforce Customer portal, you must have permission to customize application.
Setup your Salesforce customer portal
The first step to setting up your Salesforce customer portal is to Enable the portal. Once the portal is enabled, you can make multiple portals for different customers. Also Enable the Customer portal login and settings. Easily enable the customer portal at Setup. Choose Customize and click customer portal> settings>Edit>select Enable customer portal then save your changes.
Customizing your Salesforce customer portal
Once your Salesforce customer portal is enabled, you can customize different elements and features to represent the branding of your company. The customization features enables you to tailor make your application to suit your desire and your organizations feel. Customize different aspects of your customer portal from Setup. Choose customize and click customer portal>settings.
Modify fonts and colour to represent your organization’s branding. Following similar steps choose tabs and customize your customer portal tabs. Arrange them in the order that you wish they appear to your Customer portal users. Tabs available are such as answers, cases, home, ideas etc. You can also allow your users to view Web tabs.
Make your pages appear how you want them to by customizing the Customer Portal page layouts. Go to Settings then choose customize. Select the right record type and choose page layouts. Your customers can see all list views by default. If you want to choose which list views each customer can see, you have to customize the list view setting by choosing create new list views in the views section.
Set case assignment rules in order to automatically define what cases are assigned to which Salesforce user as well as defining the criteria that has to hold true in order that the case is handed. Also, create workflow alerts that will respond to portal users every time they create cases on the customer portal.
You can restrict how users gain access to the customer portal by setting up specific user functionality. Do this before enabling user access to your customer portal. This way portal users are restricted to only the customer portals assigned to their profiles.
For organizations with thousands of users, you can control the level of access for high-volume portal users. You can define how access to objects and records is allowed or restricted to your customer portal. However, if you have only a manageable number of users, then you do not have to use these features.
Conclusion
You can now enable your customer portal and let users access it. Turn on your customer portal from Setup. Click customize then choose Customer portal then settings. Select the name of your Customer Portal then click Edit. Check the login enabled box and save your changes.
Adding a customer portal URL to your organization’s website will make it easy for your customers to be able to redirect to your Salesforce customer portal.
Related materials can be found on how to customize salesforce page. Enjoy.
