Using the Customer Portal
From Standout Property Manager Wiki Help
Using the Customer Portal
This guide is for staff. It explains when to invite a customer and how Customer Portal work now fits into the Communications Centre.
When to invite
The Customer Portal is useful for applicants maintaining requirements, buyers completing onboarding, sellers following a transaction, landlords following tenancies/repairs and tenants reporting maintenance.
The contact needs a usable email address and must be correctly linked to the relevant Standout records.
Send the invitation
Open the Contact record and use the Customer Portal invitation/link action. The customer receives a time-limited secure sign-in link and can establish a password for future logins.
Review customer submissions
Use the Contact's Customer Portal/submissions view for onboarding, buyer position, AML information, secure uploads and viewing requests. Review important transaction/compliance information before relying on it simply because the customer entered it.
Work with portal messages from Communications Centre
Customer Portal messaging is now part of the Communications Centre workflow.
When a portal conversation is related to an enquiry, staff can see it in the same timeline as the original portal/website lead, emails and other activity. Where available, staff can reply through the Customer Portal directly from that enquiry.
The Customer Portal staff conversation view also shows related Communications Centre enquiries so staff can move between the customer conversation and the underlying lead/property context.
Requirements
Customer Portal property requirements are live CRM requirements. If a customer changes their search, staff see the same updated requirement set in Standout.
When processing a new portal/website enquiry, the Communications Centre can also create a new requirements set prefilled from the property being enquired about. Existing requirements are not overwritten.
Viewing requests
A portal viewing request creates a tentative diary item. Staff should confirm the appointment. For a normal portal/website enquiry, the Communications Centre can also hand directly into the viewing diary workflow.
Security
Customers can only access records linked to their authenticated contact. Never work around this by sharing another customer's link or by deliberately linking the wrong CRM contact.