Viewing calls in portal

[Melissa Gurney]

Hello,

I have another quick question - Are customers able to view outstanding requests in the portal that have been raised against a service that is only visible in Service Desk view? We have a service that our analysts use to raise requests and incidents that is not visible in the portal. These are requests that our customers would like to be able to track progress on but I cannot see a way to view these calls on the portal.

Is this possible? Or can customers only view outstanding requests that have been logged against portal visible services?

Thanks,

Melissa

[Steven Boardman]

Hi @Melissa Gurney

Customers will not see requests logged against a service which is not visible to the portals, this was designed to allow you to have in essence internal / private / technical services which are not customer facing, but where you might still want to record who the customers are.

If i understand correctly, you would like your customers to see their requests logged against this service but not be able to log new requests, as this is only available to the analysts?

If that is the case, you can make the Service visible, but just ensure that any Catalog items you have configured are set to Service Desk only, this will mean Analysts will still be able to log requests against the service, but customers will see the service exists on the portals, but will only have access to the requests they have logged against it, any FAQ's you publish relating to the service, any Known issues you publish but will not have the ability to raise new requests as they will not see the Request Catalog tab as none will be marked as available to the Portals.

So in this example, i have a desktop support service which is visible on the portal, so customers can see their requests, but they have no way to raise a new request, as i have all my service related request catalog items not visible to the portals.

Meaning the Desktop Support requests for the customer would also be visible here:

Would this help?

Steve

 

 

[Melissa Gurney]

@steven boardman thank you for explaining that.

Essentially, yes that is what we are looking for. Ideally all of their outstanding calls would be available for them to view using the "All my requests" tab on the menu.

We have a "Raise new IT incident" service visible on the portal for customers to use and we have a similar "Raise New..." service that is not visible to customers as only analysts use this. They both use different BPs and PCs, which is why they are kept separate. To make both of them visible on the portal would likely cause confusion to customers using the portal.

"All my requests" suggests that all of the customer's requests would be there, whether raised through portal or with analyst. Is this something that would be considered?

We can change the name of the analysts' service, unhide it on the portal and use the method you suggested, but it would be "cleaner" and clearer for our customers if the service didn't have to be visible for them to view associated calls.

Thank you,

Mel

[Steven Boardman]

Hi @Melissa Gurney

Thanks for getting back to me and for the explanation.

Have you considered consolidating this into a single Service and creating two Request Catalog Items for the one service?

* Request Catalog Item one - is only visible to the Service Desk, but crucially you can attribute the catalog items it's own PC and BPM.  This option won't be visible to the customers on the portal, but any requests raised for a customer using this catalog item by the analysts will still be visible against the service and the 'All My Requests' on the portal.

* Request Catalog item two - only visible to the portals, but again can be attributed it's own BPM, and PC.  This option will be available just to the customers on the portal and not the analysts.  Again any requests logged this way would also be visible to the customer on the portal against the single service, and in the 'All My Requests' list. 

Would this work for you, and not be confusing for analysts or customers as there would only be one service and customers would only see one request catalog item, and the analysts the other?

The 'All My Requests' list was designed to show a customer all the requests for services you (the service provider) wanted them to see - the option to make services not visible is provided to allow organisations if they choose to have services which their customers can't see.

I hope this helps

Steve

[Melissa Gurney]

@steven boardman thank you yes that makes more sense. I will give it a try this morning.

Melissa