Introducing Help Scout’s Customer Portal

The bigger the customer, the more people support becomes responsible for. One person reaches out about billing. Someone in another department reports a product issue. An admin has an open request with your team. Their manager wants to know what’s been resolved and what’s still outstanding.

They may all work for the same company, but from the customer’s side, those conversations have historically been disconnected. Each person knows what they’ve asked your team, but not necessarily what their colleagues have. That gets harder to manage as customer relationships grow.

Today, we’re introducing Customer Portal, a secure place where customers can view their support conversations, follow new responses, and continue working with your team. And for companies with multiple people reaching out to support, you can give customers visibility into their organization’s broader support history, not just their own.

Keep everyone on the customer side in the loop

When you support larger customers, the relationship rarely belongs to one contact. Different people may contact you for different reasons, at different times, from different parts of the business. But those conversations often relate to the same account, and the people responsible for that account need a way to understand what’s happening across it.

Consider a software company supporting one of its larger customers. An end user reports a technical issue. Their IT administrator contacts support about access. Someone in finance has a billing question. Meanwhile, the account owner wants to know whether there are any unresolved issues affecting their team.

Your support team can see those conversations in Help Scout. Until now, the customer couldn’t. Customer Portal changes that. You can give designated contacts visibility into conversations across their company, so the people responsible for the relationship can see what their organization has raised with your team, what has a new response, and what happened previously.

Individual contacts can still be limited to their own conversations. But when someone needs a broader view, you can give them one. For teams supporting complex customer accounts, that means less information trapped between individual inboxes and a better shared understanding of the relationship on both sides.

Give customers somewhere to return to

Email is great for having a conversation. It’s less useful as a record of an entire company’s relationship with your support team. Customer Portal gives customers a persistent place to return to. They can see their conversation history, check for new responses, find previous answers, and continue conversations they’ve started.

And when they need help with something new, they don’t have to leave the portal. By connecting a Beacon, you can give customers access to your help content and a way to start a new conversation with your team. For larger accounts, that means customers have one place to understand what’s already happened, what’s still in progress, and where to go when they need help next.

Instead of asking your support team to reconstruct that history, customers can find it themselves. And when multiple people are involved in the account, that context doesn’t have to disappear into whoever happened to send the original email.

Getting started

Customer Portal is available today on Help Scout Plus and Pro plans.

Account Owners and Administrators can turn it on under Manage → Customer Portal. From there, you can decide which companies and contacts get access and how much of the relationship they can see.

By default, contacts only see conversations they started themselves. For companies where broader visibility is useful, you can give selected contacts access to conversations across their entire company. You can also customize your portal with your logo and connect a Beacon so customers can search your help content or start a new conversation when they need support.

Customers don't need to create an account or password. They simply visit your portal, enter an email address associated with their Help Scout contact record, and use the six-digit verification code sent to their inbox to sign in.

For step-by-step instructions, check out our Customer Portal setup guide.