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Customer portal

The customer portal is the product your customers see. It is a separate app from the studio: your team builds workflows, knowledge, and tasks in the studio, and your customers use the results in the portal, under your name, your logo, and optionally your own domain.

On the shared platform domain, each workspace's portal lives at /portal/<your-workspace-slug>. With a custom domain configured, the portal is served from your domain's root instead.

What customers see​

A signed-in customer gets a simple two-section navigation:

  • Workspace
    • Chat: a chat connected to your workflows (this is also the landing page).
    • Tasks: their guided onboarding journey.
  • Account
    • Profile, Password, and Settings: account management.
    • Billing: plans, checkout, and payment history.
    • Support: support cases with your team.

Notifications​

A notification bell in the top bar keeps customers informed without email chasing. Customers are notified when:

EventNotification
A task is assigned to them"New task: <task name>", linking to their Tasks page.
An appointment is booked for themThe appointment title and time.
A quote or invoice is sent to themThe title and amount, linking to Billing.
Their payment is receivedA payment confirmation.

Your team gets the mirror image in the studio: new leads, signups, completed tasks, and payments all raise studio notifications.

Chat​

Portal chat runs on the same engine as the studio Playground: the customer's messages are handled by one of your workflows, grounded in your Knowledge Base. Which workflows the customer can reach is under your control; see Which workflows a customer can chat with.

The input placeholder is branded: by default it uses your portal display name (for example, "Ask Acme anything about your knowledge base"), and you can override the text in Settings.

Each customer also has their own private slice of knowledge. On first contact, the platform creates a private, indexed folder for them in your default knowledge base, keyed to an identity derived from their email address. Files they upload through tasks land there, and retrieval for their chats can include their own documents plus your public knowledge, while other customers can never see them. See Visibility and tenant isolation.

Tasks​

The Tasks page presents the customer's onboarding as a journey: a rail titled "Your journey" lists each assigned task with a progress ring and a status (Ready to start, In progress, or Completed). Selecting a task opens a guided conversation that asks the task's questions one at a time; answers are saved as the customer goes, so they can leave and come back. File-upload steps upload straight into the customer's private knowledge folder, and payment steps open Stripe Checkout. Signature steps show the task's agreement text above a draw-to-sign pad (mouse or touch); on submit, the agreement, the customer's answers, and the signature are rendered into a PDF filed in the customer's private knowledge folder. When everything is done, the page says "You're all caught up."

Tasks are authored in the studio's task builder; see Onboarding tasks.

Billing​

The Billing page ("Plans & payments") shows the offerings and plans you sell through your own connected Stripe account. Customers buy through Stripe Checkout and see their payment history and subscriptions on the same page. If you have not enabled billing, the page simply has nothing to sell.

Support​

Customers open support cases with a subject, description, and priority, and exchange messages on each case. Cases arrive in your studio's Support area.

How customers sign up or are invited​

There are two doors into your portal, and they lead to the same place:

  • Invited: you invite a customer from Customer Management. The invite email carries a link that pre-fills their email address and lets your onboarding pre-assign work.
  • Self signup: anyone who reaches your portal and authenticates becomes a customer of your workspace automatically. Signing in is the signup; no invite is required.

Either way, the signup screen is the same:

  1. The customer sees your logo and portal name and chooses how to join: Continue with Google, or an email and password. On an invite link, the email address is fixed to the invited one.
  2. Password signups set a password (entered twice), then confirm a 6-digit verification code emailed to them. There is a resend option, and a link to sign in instead if the account already exists. An invite link that was already used explains that and points to sign-in.
  3. On the first authenticated request, membership is granted server-side: the customer is enrolled with the customer role and attached to your default project when one is configured, and your team gets a "New customer signed up" notification.

A forgot-password flow is available from the login page.

One person, one customer: if the same email address arrives through different sign-in methods (say, a password account created from an invite and a later Google sign-in), the platform unifies them onto one customer identity per workspace, so their tasks, conversations, and files stay together.

note

Customer accounts are portal-only. A customer who tries to open the studio is rejected; your team's studio accounts are entirely separate.

Which workflows a customer can chat with​

Three things decide what a customer's portal chat can talk to:

  1. Workflows available to everyone: in the studio's workflow settings, the Customer access card has a checkbox, "Available to every portal customer." Checked, the workflow is open to all customers, including brand-new, unassigned ones. This is what keeps a first-time visitor out of a dead end with no chat available.
  2. Per-customer assignments: workflows assigned to specific customers (for example, chosen when inviting them). An assignment is either chat (the customer can converse with it) or task (a questionnaire they must complete).
  3. The default project: customers enrolled into your default project can chat with any workflow in that project, without per-workflow assignment.

Everything else stays invisible to customers.

Onboarding tasks on signup​

To hand new customers work automatically:

  1. Build the tasks in the task builder and publish them.
  2. Build (or install from the recipe gallery) an onboarding workflow: one with a Customer Signup Trigger and Customer Task nodes referencing your tasks. The Faberiq starter bundle ships one set up this way ("Customer journey · Signup paperwork"), along with published intake, NDA, and Terms & Conditions tasks.
  3. In the studio's Settings, under Customer portal onboarding workflows, tick the workflows that should run as customer journeys. This list requires a default project to be chosen first.

From then on, every customer who joins (invited or self-signup) gets one assignment per Customer Task node, sees them on their Tasks page, and receives a "New task" notification. The sync is idempotent: it never duplicates an assignment the customer already has.

No-login task widgets​

Customers can also complete a task without logging in at all. Every task assignment can be shared as a /t/<token> magic link, or embedded in any website as an iframe of the same widget. You create and share those links from the task builder; see Magic links and embeds.

The widget:

  • Validates its token before showing anything; a revoked or invalid link shows "This link isn't active."
  • Carries your portal branding, and links back to your portal.
  • Runs the same guided conversation as the signed-in Tasks page, saving answers as the visitor goes.

Because the visitor is anonymous there, file-upload, payment, and signature steps are left for the signed-in portal; the widget shows a "continue in the portal" hand-off for them.

Branding​

The portal carries your brand, not Faberiq's. In the studio, open Settings and edit the organization section (admin only):

SettingEffect
Portal display nameThe name shown in the portal header (and used in the default chat placeholder).
Portal logoShown in the portal header. Provide a URL or upload an image (PNG, JPG, or WebP up to 4MB); a preview is shown.
Portal brand colorUsed for buttons and accents in the portal and in invite emails. Pick with the color swatch or type a hex value.
Chat placeholderOptional override for the chat input's placeholder text.
Enable white-label customer portalTurns on white-label treatment for your portal.

Branding also reaches customers before they sign in: the signup and invite pages load your logo and display name, so the first thing an invited customer sees is your brand.

Custom domains​

By default your portal is served on the shared platform domain under /portal/<your-slug>. To serve it from your own domain:

  1. In Settings, fill in Customer portal domain with the hostname, for example alpharow.co.
  2. Point that hostname's DNS at the platform.

Custom domains are provisioned by the platform: once the domain is saved and DNS points at the platform, your portal is served directly from your domain's root (for example https://alpharow.co/chat instead of /portal/alpharow/chat), and links, redirects, and signup flows all use the clean paths. A TLS certificate for the domain must be installed on the platform's proxy, so coordinate with support when you add a new domain. Leave the field empty to serve the portal only under the shared domain.

Launch checklist​

A reasonable order for taking a portal live:

  1. Brand it: set the portal display name, logo, and brand color in Settings.
  2. Pick a default project: new customers are enrolled into it and can chat with its workflows.
  3. Open a front door: mark at least one workflow "Available to every portal customer" so a first-time visitor always has something to chat with.
  4. Prepare onboarding: publish your tasks, wire them into an onboarding workflow (or install the Faberiq starter bundle, which does this for you), and tick it under Customer portal onboarding workflows.
  5. Seed knowledge: upload the documents the chat should answer from, into indexed public folders.
  6. Invite your first customer from Customer Management, or share the portal link and let them sign up directly.
  7. Optionally, add your custom domain and enable white-label.