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A Complete Guide on How to Enable Customer Portal in Salesforce

Maulik Shah August 22, 2022

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For more than 20 years now, Salesforce has been constantly and innovatively helping all sales teams streamline different aspects of operations. Even though Salesforce had the first-mover advantage, it has always been one of the most efficient and reliable CRMs in the market which has rightfully earned its position as the market leader. While we can endlessly and appreciatively talk about Salesforce and its wide range of functionalities, for this article, we will be focusing on the Salesforce customer portal and lay out a detailed guide on how to enable it.

Salesforce started with a vision of being ‘a world-class internet company for sales force automation’ and in all its glory, it truly is — with a gamut of tools, platforms, add-ons, and technologies. In its entirety, Salesforce is truly a universe of sales force automation tools.

Before we get into the details on how to enable the customer portal in Salesforce, let’s get a quick understanding of what a Salesforce customer portal is.

Salesforce Customer Portal

The Salesforce customer portal is one of the most efficient ways of sharing information with your customers and building a self-sufficient community of customers which essentially means empowering your customers with all the necessary information so that they can resolve their inquiries without contacting your support staff. A customer portal is among the three ways in which you can manage your customers in Salesforce — the other two being Chatter Answers and Self-service Portal.

Salesforce Customer Portal supports the following record types:

Activities
Cases
Assets
Documents
Solutions
And custom objects

Importance of Enabling Salesforce Customer Portal

Apart from its primary function of equipping customers with the right information at the right time, having a customer portal goes a long way in building customer relationships and positively adds to the overall customer experience with your brand.

Since the portal streamlines all pieces of information for your customers and makes it easier for their access as and when they want, it reduces the overall cost for customer support and enables your support team to go above and beyond to add more value and delight to customers’ experiences.

A Detailed Guide to Enable Customer Portal in Salesforce

Enabling the customer portal in Salesforce is quite straightforward. There are no prerequisites apart from having a Salesforce license.

Step 1: Navigate to the Setup option

Step 2: From Setup, click on the small down arrow icon beside the Customer Portal option

Step 3: On clicking the button, you will see the Settings option

Once you see the Settings option, click on it which will successfully activate Salesforce Customer Portal.

Step 4: After settings, click on the Edit button from where you will see the Enable Customer Portal option.

Step 5: Click Save to save the settings.

A Few Tips to Follow After Enabling Customer Portal in Salesforce

Once your customer portal is ready, you can check into the various other portal-based needs and create multiple customer portals for your customers.

These items are available once the Customer Portal is enabled:

High Volume Customer Portal
Authenticated Website
Customer Portal Manager
Customer Portal User Profiles

… if you have their user licenses.

You can enable the Enable Customer Portal User and View Customer Portal User buttons on contact and personal account records.
You will get access to All Customer Portal Users and All Internal Users groups with the Roles and Internal Subordinates sharing rule category.
Once the Customer Portal is enabled, it cannot be disabled. Although, you can restrict users from logging in to it.

How to Create Multiple Customer Portals in Salesforce

As mentioned above, based on your business needs, use cases, and types of users, you might want to create multiple customer portals. Different customer portals focused on different purposes would provide an enriching experience to the customers.

Here is how you can create multiple customer portals in Salesforce:

Follow similar steps as mentioned above up until customer portal settings, and then click on the New option. And that’s it.

You can further name the particular Customer Portal and customize its functions based on its primary purpose.

Wrapping up:

The Salesforce customer portal is one of the most efficient tools you can have for your business. It does the work of managing multiple aspects of your business and gives you the big picture.

This works only when you carefully curate everything you need out of it and set up the portal in the way you need. Once your workflow is ready, it’ll streamline your operations and give you results.