How the Customer Portal Works
The Customer Portal is a personal tracking page for your customer. Think of it like Amazon order tracking, but for monuments. Your customer can see where their order is, what stage it's in, and whether any action is needed from them.
Written By Dennis Rodin
Last updated About 9 hours ago
Watch the full walkthrough:
How to access it
Open any order and look at the top of the order overview. You will see a Customer Portal button with two options:
Copy Link copies the customer portal link so you can share it manually.
View Portal opens the portal page in your browser so you can see what your customer sees.
What your customer sees
At the top left, the portal shows your company name (pulled from Settings > Company Profile), the decedent name, and the name of the team member who created the order.
A colored bubble shows the current stage the order is in. Below that, the order number and two contact buttons: Call Us Anytime (your company phone number) and Email Us (your company email). Both are pulled from your Company Profile settings.
On the right side, your customer sees a progress timeline showing all your stages from left to right. This is the tracking view.
Controlling what your customer sees
Not every stage needs to be visible to your customer. You can make stages customer-facing or internal only.
To set this up, click the Stages button at the top right of your Order Management board. In the Edit Workflow Stages popup, each stage has a toggle for customer-facing or internal only.
If a stage is set to internal only, your customer will not see it. Instead, the portal will show the last stage that was customer-facing. For example, if you have five internal stages after "In Production" (like "Stone Needs Repair" or "Stone Needs Sandblasting"), your customer will still see "In Production" until the order reaches the next customer-facing stage.
Stage subtext
Under each stage name on the portal, there is a line of text that your customer reads. You can customize this by clicking Edit Subtext next to any stage in the Edit Workflow Stages popup. Make sure you click Save next to the text field after editing, and then click Save and Exit at the top right.
By default, the portal shows a blue bubble that says "We're working on this step, no action needed from you at this time."
Action required mode
Some stages need your customer to do something, like pay a deposit. For these, turn on Action Required in the stage settings. When enabled, the stage lights up yellow on the portal and shows a text box where you write what the customer needs to do.
Two stages come with Action Required turned on by default:
Quote says "A deposit is required before work can begin on your order."
Order Balance Required (between In Production and Ready to Install) tells the customer to pay the remaining balance before installation.
You can turn Action Required on or off for any stage and customize the message. This is a powerful way to communicate with many customers at once. For example, during winter, you could add an action required message to your production stage saying "Due to snow and ice, installations are paused until late February or March."
Documents on the portal
Your customer can see documents on the portal, but only the ones you mark as External.
Inside the order, go to Internal Notes & Docs. Each document has two buttons: Internal and External. Click External to make it visible on the customer portal. Click Internal to hide it.
By default, Drawing and Financial Document categories are set to External. Permit, Instructions, and Reference are set to Internal. You can override any document by clicking the toggle.
Turning the portal on or off
You can control the portal in two places.
In the New Quote popup: At the last step, you will see Automation Settings with a toggle to turn the Customer Portal on or off for this specific order.
In the Order Overview: The Customer Portal section has a toggle called Send portal link to customer. When turned on, the portal link is active and View Customer Portal and Copy Customer Portal Link are clickable. When turned off, both options are grayed out and no email is sent.
The portal is set to on by default for monument orders that have a customer email. It is automatically off for wholesale customers (if you selected wholesale at the top right of the New Quote popup).
The portal is disabled and locked in two cases:
Service orders. The portal only supports monument orders. If you hover over the disabled menu, a tooltip says "Customer Portal is not available for service orders."
No customer email on file. Without an email, there is no way for the customer to receive the portal link. The tooltip says "Add a customer email to enable the portal. Edit the order to add an email address."
If both conditions apply, the tooltip shows both reasons: "Customer Portal is not available for service orders. Additionally, no customer email is on file."
Tip: We recommend keeping the portal on for all regular orders. It saves you time by letting customers check their order status instead of calling your office.