8 posts tagged with "Portals"

You can now provide customers with traffic-aware ETAs for their events.

A set of variables have been added to communication templates which let you:

• Provide the wall clock time of when the engineer is set to arrive at the customer's property: {{ eta(event) | date('H:i') }} (eg. 13:21)
• Provide the duration in minutes until the engineer will arrive: {{ eta(event) | duration }} (eg. 12 minutes)

These should help enhance the usefulness of automatic messages you send to your customers through triggers once an engineer departs to their event.

For communications which link customers to the tracking portal, the ETA will also be shown on this page once the engineer has departed, and updated periodically if the situation changes due to traffic.

This feature works best if you're using JobStaq for location tracking, either via our hardware vehicle trackers or the OwnTracks mobile tracking beta, however, we'll resort to using your schedule to calculate ETAs from the previous event if this data is not available.

A number of small changes have been added to the booking portal, which lets customers schedule events into your calendar automatically.

• Customers can now attach files to their booking, to provide images for you to access prior to visiting the site
• You can group job types into categories, to help break up the list of work you offer into smaller sections
• Dark mode is now available, in addition to the standard light mode theme
• You can customise the range of dates which customers can schedule work for (previously fixed at 1-30 days), either at the booking portal level, or you can override this per job type (for example, setting a longer lead time for work which requires parts ordering)
• Same day bookings are now supported, if you opt-in (the default remains at 1-30 days)

Users on all plans now have the option to enable the enquiry customer portal through the web interface (here). This provides a form you can use to collect job requests from customers online - either through a hosted portal on our website, or embedded directly onto your website. You'll receive a notification when an enquiry is created through this form.

The initial release lets you gather customer contact details, the site address, request description & photos. Over time, we're hoping to make this more customisable to allow gathering extra information, and to integrate the enquiry portal into the central customer portal so that customers can select from a dropdown of their properties without having to re-enter all details for each request.

A demo of this form can be found at https://portal.jobstaq.co.uk/jobstaq-demo/enquire if you'd like to try it out to see whether you'd like to enable it for your account.

We've provided support for taking online payments on invoice portals through Stripe for a while now, however, every business has different payment processor preferences, so it's been difficult to prioritise which other payment integrations are worth developing and maintaining.

To provide a wide range of integrations, JobStaq is now able to make use of any payment methods you have configured through your accounting software (Xero, QuickBooks or Freeagent). You can control the default online payment methods available for each invoice from the customer portal settings page in the web interface, and can override these settings on individual invoices if required.

Additionally, you can set a preference for whether to show the JobStaq customer invoice portal pages to customers, or use your accounting software's portal fron the customer portal options settings. At present, you can choose to always use the JobStaq portal, always use the accounting portal, or use the accounting portal when payment is due.

The customer experience when paying through any payment gateways provided through your accounting software will be less smooth than any native integrations in JobStaq, so we will continue to monitor which payment systems are in use by our customers to influence future native JobStaq integrations for payments.

We've made a large upgrade to our existing individual portals, which could be shared to give access to a single document such as a quote, invoice, or engineer tracking. Now, you have the option to allow customers to login to a central portal, where they can access details on all of their jobs, upcoming events, quotes, invoices and forms.

What's Available Now?

For subscribers on our gold plan, you now have access to the customer portal feature. On the portal settings page in the web interface, you are able to configure branding for the portal, optionally link custom domains, and set the default access level for new customers in your account (this defaults to no access).

From the options menu on the customer page, you're able to select the access role assigned to the customer, and also preview the portal as the customer, so you have an idea what your customer will see.

Coming Soon

We still have a number of improvements planned for the portal, including integration with the automatic booking system, customisation of features your customers can access, and the ability to raise new jobs directly from the portal. If you've got any other ideas on how we can improve the portal for your needs, please reach out and let us know!

We've just released a few improvements to customer portals to help give you more control over your branding. All these settings can be managed through the web interface customer portal settings page, at https://web.jobstaq.co.uk/#/settings/customer_portal.

Custom domains Users of our Gold tier can now configure their customer portal (and link shortener) to be accessed via one of their own domains, rather than the default portal.jobstaq.co.uk. More details on how to use this feature can be found here.

Favicons, light & dark logos Previously, the logos shown on the customer portal pages were the same as the one we use on generated PDFs, which while fine in most cases, some users wanted more flexibility. You're now able to override the default logo with a light theme and dark theme logo for the customer portals if required (for example, if you have a secondary logo design for displaying on dark backgrounds). You're also able to upload a favicon image that will be shown in browsers next to the tab name, and in preview links in some third party applications.

Custom HTML You're now able to provide HTML snippets to be inserted into the head or end of the document body on all portal pages. This may be useful if you want to gather analytics data for your customer's usage of the portal, or would like to insert a live chat widget to the page to provide your customers a way to raise any questions about the quote or invoice they're viewing.

We've rolled out an update to the layout of all customer portals in response to customer feedback, in order to improve the layout and information density. Functionality remains the same in most cases, with the exception of the Stripe integration on the invoice portal, where we now embed the payment form on the page, rather than redirecting to Stripe checkout (which was previously required as at the time of the first version, there was no support for embedding BACS payments on our site).

Our customer booking portal allows customers to self-sechedule work to save administrative time for your business, when scheduling new or repeat work. We've made improvements to the confirmation screen of this portal, so that customers now get presented with an add to calendar dropdown, to save details of their booking to their preferred calendar software, so they don't forget when this work was scheduled for.

When used, an event will be created on their calendar with your company's contact details (incase work needs re-scheduling), time range, approximate duration, job type, and the property which the work takes place at.