A customer portal and knowledge base where customers help themselves

A customer wants to know how to add a new user. They search your website, find a PDF from three years ago, and email support instead. Two days later they email again: "Did you get my question?" Because nowhere can they see whether it was picked up, by whom, and when to expect an answer.

On the other side sits your support team. It answers the same question about adding a user four times a week. The answer lives in a document on a shared drive, but customers cannot reach it. And the "did you get it" emails become tickets of their own.

So two things are needed. A place where customers follow their own questions, without another account and password they will forget anyway. And a knowledge base that is truly public, findable in Google, and that you keep current because you can see which articles are missing.

In Lumo both hang off your helpdesk. The customer portal shows each customer their own tickets with your team's replies. They never see internal notes. When they ask a new question, the portal first shows articles that look like it. Often that is enough, and if not, a ticket is created as usual.

You write the knowledge base in Lumo in Markdown, with categories and a version history. The insights tab shows what people search for most, what they search for without results and which articles do not help. That is your writing list for next week. How to set up a helpdesk including a knowledge base is covered in the guide set up a helpdesk.

This is a made-up example to show the flow, not a customer case.

Say a SaaS company for scheduling software has 200 business customers. The support team of two answers the same questions every week. How do I add a user? How do I export the schedule? Why did my integration stop syncing? Every question came by email, and customers often emailed twice because they could not see whether anyone had picked it up.

The team sets up the knowledge base with five categories: Getting started, Users and roles, Schedules, Integrations and Billing. They start with twelve articles on the questions that come back most, in English first. For their Dutch customers they later write Dutch versions of the eight most read articles.

Then they switch on the customer portal and put the link under every support email and in the app's help menu. A customer who wants to add a user asks a new question, types it, and sees the matching article suggested. They read it and never send the question. Another customer has a question about a sync error that is not in the knowledge base, and sends it. They see their ticket in the portal, read the reply and mark it as solved themselves.

Every Monday team lead Ana looks at searches without results. In week one "single sign-on" is at the top. She writes an article explaining what the product supports, and a week later checks whether the term has dropped off the list.

The customer portal is the customer side of your helpdesk. A question from the portal becomes a ticket with the same statuses, SLA targets and macros as a ticket from the mailbox. A conversation in live chat that you turn into a ticket shows up in the portal too.

Portal tickets count toward customer health, which your customer success team uses on the customer success page. And Lumo for customer service shows how portal, knowledge base, chat and tickets form one working day.