• Your user profile
• Branding your Helprace
• Adding an email account to Helprace
• Solving your first support ticket
• Participating in the community
• Community in the admin panel
• Integrating Helprace with your website

Every Admin, Agent and Owner has a profile and requests manager in the portal, too.

Ways users can join your user portal

Here are some ways your users can join:

Sign up

Click Login and Sign Up. This prompts you for your email and password.

Send an email 

When you send an email to a Helprace-serviced address (ie. support@company.helprace.com), that email can be used to log in to the portal at http://company.helprace.com.
Clicking "forgot password" sends a password reset link to that email.

Log in using your social media accounts

Authenticate yourself using your social media accounts without having to register.
Helprace allows you to log in using your Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts.

Be invited by an Owner, Admin or Agent using the admin panel

A staff member can invite another user using their email address. At that point, the invitee will receive an email with a confirmation link with further instructions.

Single Sign-On and API

Learn more about setting up SSO (Single Sign-On) here: Setting up Single Sign-On (SSO) and the Helprace API: Introduction to Helprace REST API 

Your user portal account

Your Avatar

Your avatar can be seen at the top right corner of the support portal you're logged into.

Your Name

Click on your avatar, select your name. You will see your activity.

In Participation, you can see topics started by you. You can also see what you're following. Remove your followed items by clicking on the flag next to them.

Requests

Click on your avatar, select Requests.

Mine

By default, your requests are categorized in:

• All, all requests ever submitted by you 
• Open, requests that are waiting for a response from the support agent 
• Answered, requests that are waiting for a response from you 
• Solved, tickets that you or your support agent considers as solved

Organization

Depending on Organization permissions, users may or may not view or participate in their Organization's tickets. Learn more

If the Organization is set as Visible or Shared, you'll see requests sorted by Mine and My Organization.

Restricted permission

Users can view their own tickets only, unable to see other Organization's tickets. Example:

Visible permission

Users can view all tickets within their organization, but not be able to participate in them. Example:

Shared permission

Users can view and reply to all tickets within their organization. Example:

If you're satisfied with the answer, check Consider this request solved when replying. The staff member working on your ticket will see that your issue is resolved. 

You can re-open a Solved request by responding to it.

Profile

Click on your avatar, select Profile.

Personal information

• Name
• Job Title
• Organization Name
• Organization Website
• Avatar
• Time Zone

You can also change your password and adjust the email notifications settings.

Avatar

You can add a photo to your profile from your computer (the image file must not be larger than 1MB). Alternatively, if you have a gravatar associated with your email address, your profile picture will already be set with that gravatar. To associate your email address with a photo, visit http://gravatar.com

Emails & Notifications

Control your email accounts and email preferences in Emails & Notifications.

Primary Email

This is the email you used to sign up to your Helprace account. By clicking on the ( x ) button beside the email, you can disassociate that email with your account. All notifications from the community will be sent to your primary email.

You cannot delete your only email address. You can only do so after adding and verifying a secondary address.

Secondary Emails

If you'd like to add additional emails, you can do so here. You can make your secondary email addresses primary.

Upon adding and verifying a secondary address, you will be able to log in using both addresses, but your password will remain the same.

Email Notifications

As a user, you can set email notifications to keep track of:

• New replies to topics that you posted, replied to or followed
• Option to receive a "daily digest" instead of a notification for every single event

As a staff member, you can set email notifications for the above in addition to:

• Every new topics created, and their subsequent status changes (e.g. if an Idea status was changed from Planned to Started)
• Every new reply and comment to every topic
• Option to receive a digest instead of a separate notifications for these events

Change Password

To change your password, simply type in your existing password, your new one and click Save.

External Accounts

If you log in to Helprace using your social media account (Facebook, Twitter or Google+), that account will appear in this list. The first name, last name and email address that your social media account is associated with will be applied to Helprace. You can remove this association by clicking on the ( x ) button.

If you already have a Helprace account, logging in with your social media account will cause it to show up in this list.

Here are some of the things you can do with your Helprace account:

• Customize your CSS
• Change your logo
• Change the name of your portal
• Change your favicon
• Customize your portal home page
• Setting up spaces
• Manage your spaces
• Setting up the feedback widget
• Using your existing company email in Helprace
• Using your own domain with Helprace

Customize your CSS, header & footer

Head to  Settings > Customization.

You can upload your custom CSS stylesheets, add custom header and footer, and add HTML code to the <head> tag. Learn more: Portal customization

Change your logo

Head to  Settings > Branding.

Upload your logo & click Save. Your new logo will appear in the portal header immediately.

When the logo is clicked, it takes you to the website URL. If left blank, it links to your portal homepage.

Pick a png image with square proportions (64x64 px recommended). A simple graphic works best since it is recognizable when shrunk down to small dimensions.

Change the name of your portal

Head to  Settings > Branding.

Your Helprace portal name can be changed anytime. This name shows up at the top left of your portal beside your logo. It also shows up in the RSS feeds and email notifications associated with the portal (not emails or tickets).

Leave the name blank if you don't want it to appear on the portal.

Clicking on the name in the portal will take you to your portal homepage.

Change your favicon

Head to  Settings > Branding.

You can brand your Helprace with a favicon. A favicon is a small icon that appears beside your website in the browser tab. To add one: 

Pick a png image with square proportions (max 32x32 px recommended). 

Customize your portal home page

Head to  Settings > Home Page or  Settings > Space Page.

You are able to customize the following blocks on your Helprace home page and Space pages. Blocks are modules that refer to components of your Helprace portal.

Spaces are sections within your Helprace that you can categorize your company's goods and services into.

Portal with Spaces:

Conversely, If you've set up Spaces, your homepage blocks and channel blocks will be split up. The portal's homepage is on the left and the Space page is on the right.

From the Home Page or Space Page, you can show or hide your blocks. You can also specify the amount of items or how they appear in the block.

Setting up spaces and categories

Spaces are multiple portals within your Helprace user portal. Learn more about Spaces. You can select public, private, or staff-only space restrictions. Custom space restrictions limit spaces to a combination of Teams, User Groups and Organizations. See Space restrictions

Head to  Settings > Spaces and select type.

Here are the types of spaces you can set up in Helprace:

• Space
• Product
• Service
• Forum
• Department

In the example above, we chose "Space" as our space type, and that means the words "Select Space" will appear below your company logo on the portal homepage.

Categories are sub-sections of your Items (question, idea, problem, knowledge base). This helps you collect more targeted feedback, or organize your documentation better.

Learn more about categories for knowledge base, community and change their order.

Here is the relationship between Spaces and Categories:

Setting up the feedback widget

A feedback widget brings up a condensed Helprace portal interface using a tab shown on your website. Learn more about the feedback widget here.

• Head to  Settings > Feedback Widget.
• Select your integration type - that is, whether you want to use a JavaScript tab or create your own link to the widget.
• If you chose Tab, input the Tab Title, position and color. By default tab looks like this: 

• Click Generate Code.
• Copy and paste the resulting code just before the </body> tag of the web page where you want your feedback tab to appear.
• Click Save.

Using existing company email account with Helprace

You can set your existing email account name to work with Helprace. That is, if you’re already using support@mycompany.com, you can forward its contents to your Helprace account (support@mycompany.helprace.com). You can also set up multiple mailboxes to handle various departments and enable personalized emails.

Click here to learn more: Adding an email account to Helprace

Using your own domain with Helprace

Domain mapping or domain aliasing is used when you want to direct one of your domains to Helprace.

To learn more, read Using your own domain with Helprace

What's a ticket? A ticket is a support case or request that your customer sends to your company to be handled by your support team.

The email sending process is managed by a rule found in  Settings > Rules and Notifications, called "Notify requester about public reply". Disabling it will prevent emails from being sent.

Creating your first support ticket

Let's pretend you're a customer wishing to open a ticket. You can do this from the User Portal by clicking on Submit a Request tab:

You can also send an email to your Helprace account.

When you signed up for your account, you received a Helprace support email address: support@youraccountname.helprace.com. You can see your account name in the address bar when you're logged in to the Helprace staff console.

Here, we're using Gmail to send a ticket to your Helprace help desk (send a test email from an address, which is different from the address you used when signed up for Helprace):

Solving the ticket

Now open the staff console. You'll find the ticket on the   Tickets page in the staff console under the All Unsolved filter after a few moments.

Click on the ticket and you will see its details, the reply field, and the user message on the right. Type your reply to the customer.

You can see the Submit as button right below the message field. You must click it to send the email to the customer. Alternatively, clicking on the downward arrow will show you a list of other ticket statuses.

Let's select Submit as Pending. This means that we're waiting for the customer's reply or additional information from the customer. To learn more about ticket statuses, take a look at this article: Ticket statuses

When you're replying to a ticket, it is assigned to you automatically.

Responding to the ticket as a customer

When you open up your email client, you'll see your messages. You can customize how your emails look, and who gets automatic email notifications, and how.

Simply reply to this email. The ticket will be reopened and the agent, whom the ticket has been assigned to will get a notification.

PS. You can customize how your emails look and feel to the recipient by checking the Email placeholder guide or by Editing email templates.

• How does it work?
• What are tickets?
• What happens when I respond to a ticket?
• How to change the look and behavior of email notifications?

How does it work?

When you signed up for your account in Helprace, you've received your own email address that is associated with your Helprace account. The address includes your help desk subdomain. For example, if you signed up for a Helprace account with "acme" subdomain, your user portal is accessible via acme.helprace.com and your helpdesk's email address is support@acme.helprace.com. Whenever users send an email to support@acme.helprace.com it will appear in your Helprace admin panel in 'Tickets' section.

You can familiarize yourself with your new email by going to  Settings > TICKETS > Mailboxes page (only accessible to Owners or Admins).

You might also want to use your existing support email (e.g. support@mycompany.com) in your Helprace account as well. This way, messages sent to your existing support address would also be converted to tickets in your Helprace. You could also reply from that address via Helprace. Learn more: Adding mailboxes and setting up email forwarding

What are tickets?

When a customer sends you an email, it is magically transformed into a ticket before it reaches your Helprace admin panel. You or another agent also gets an email with the customer's message. Similarly, when you respond to a ticket, it reaches your customer in the form of an email.

Tickets are so much more convenient and flexible than simple emails thanks to the awesome search and filtering function, macros and canned responses, ticket statuses, tags, and your custom workflow scenarios supported by Helprace.

What happens when I respond to a ticket from Helprace?

Your customer receives a reply from you, which looks like a normal email. You can customize your email messages to include things like the ticket number, conversation history, satisfaction survey and much more. You can edit your email templates. Learn more: Editing email templates

How to change the look and behavior of email notifications?

These email notifications are sent by triggers that are activated under certain conditions, such as when a user replies to a ticket or ticket status is changed. You can change the behavior of the triggers and the look of email templates. Learn more: Rules & Notifications

What does 'From' looks like when my customer gets a ticket response from me?

This is something that you can configure in a few different ways. Check this article for more details: When I send an email using Helprace, who is it 'From'?

When a user with many emails contacts me, what address do I respond to?

Find out more here: Where do my replies get sent?

Here is a quick guide to setting up Helprace on your own URL

Step 1: Creating a CNAME record in your DNS Zone File

Login to your Domain Control Panel.

Go to the section which says DNS or Name Servers.

Create a new CNAME DNS record and point your custom support URL to company.helprace.com. You may need to fill in these details:

• Enter a Time To Live (TTL) between 30 minutes to 1 hour (normally it is set in seconds, so type a number like 1800 or 3600 there) or leave the default setting.
• Alias Name: Enter the subdomain name for your alias. For example, if you want to use your own support URL like support.company.com, enter "support" as your alias name.
• Point to Host Name: Type your Helprace support URL (e.g. company.helprace.com).

Save changes to your DNS records.

Here are a few examples of how you can add a CNAME record in different control panels:

Note that these instructions may vary a bit based on your domain registrar. If you are unable to find a way to add the DNS record, get help from your webmaster or your server administrator.

Before heading over to the next step, you may have to wait for your DNS to be fully propagated. This can take anywhere from a few to 48 hours.

Step 2: Setting up your Helpdesk URL in Helprace

After creating the CNAME record, login to your Helprace Admin Panel as an administrator.

Go to  Settings > Branding.

Type your own support URL (e.g. support.mycompany.com) to the Domain Alias field.

Click Save to save the new settings and to start using your own support URL.

Once done, you can verify your changes by entering your support URL in this page and looking up your CNAME records.