The Customer Portal is a way to share a live view of a customer’s open tickets. Similar to the Slack-based request tracker, this will allow a user to see the status of all tickets that they’ve created, and this can be embedded onto your dashboard or shared a standalone site.
This feature is currently in beta, so please bear with us as we make improvements over time.
Sign in to your Unthread dashboard and navigate to “Settings” → “Apps & Integrations” → “In-App Chat Widget”.
On the settings page, you can customize the appearance of the customer portal, including the greeting message that appears when a user first opens the page. These settings can be modified later.
Select a channel that chat messages will be posted to in Slack.
Add assignment and escalation rules for conversations started from the customer portal..
Once you have customized the customer portal to your liking, click the “Save” button to generate the code that you will need to add to your website. This will also generate an identity verification secret. See below for how to use this to verify user identities.
✨ Configuration settings can be updated remotely without changing any code on your site!
In order to determine which tickets belong the current user, you must verify that the email address actually
belongs to the user. This will require the identity verification secret that
was generated on the customer portal settings page. You will also need to be able to
modify the server side code of your website.
Copy the identity verification secret and put it somewhere secure that is
accessible by your website’s server. This secret should never be exposed on
the frontend of your website because it can be used to impersonate other
users.
When a user logs into your website, you will use the secret to generate an
HMAC of the user’s email address. See below on how to generate the HMAC. The
HMAC should be generated on your server and sent to your frontend as part of
the login process. The HMAC will be passed as part of the user object passed
to the start call.
How you generate the HMAC verification hash depends on what language you use
on your server. Here are some examples in different languages:
Javascript (Node.js)
When a user logs out, you should call stop to end the session. This will clear the user’s ticket history and prevent the next user from seeing the previous user’s ticket history.
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window.$unthread.helpCenter("stop");
🍪 Speaking of cookies: the customer portal only uses first-party cookies, meaning they cannot track users across different website and are more privacy-centric.