# The customer portal at a glance

> Source: https://support.usebluehill.com/customer-portal-customer-portal-overview  |  Updated: 2026-10-27T13:54:45Z

## Two sides of one feature

The portal has a customer side and a team side.

- **Your customers** open it in a browser, sign in with a code sent to their email, and see the help center with two extra links in the header: **Tickets**, and **Home** when they have onboarding access. There is nothing to install and no password to remember.
- **Your team** never signs in to the portal to do its work. Invitations, customer links, access levels and self sign-up are managed in the main app, and portal tickets arrive in the Support inbox like any other ticket.

<img src="https://api.usebluehill.com/wiki/media/public/org_5a6906d4877a411f83f525d10e20355c/9ff273c03b0055dcb1e1c70401d34c27.png" alt="The Support tickets page as a signed-in customer sees it" width="1440" height="900" />

## Where the portal lives

The portal and your help center are one website. Until you add a custom domain, that website is *portal.usebluehill.com*: the help center sits under */help/* followed by your workspace's address, and the signed-in pages (**Tickets**, **Home**, **My Profile**) sit at the root of the site. Once a custom domain such as *help.yourcompany.com* is verified, the help center becomes its home page and the same domain serves the signed-in pages too.

The portal takes its name, logo, accent colour and footer from the help center's **Branding** settings. If you run several support brands, each brand's help center is its own site, and a customer sees the branding of the site they signed up on or last visited. See [Branding, addresses and brands](./customer-portal-branding-and-domains).

## Who can sign in

| Person | Can they sign in? |
|---|---|
| A **portal user** you invited | Yes. They receive an invitation, create their account and sign in with an emailed code. |
| A visitor who **signed themselves up** | Yes, if you have switched on self sign-up for that help center and their email domain is allowed. |
| A **workspace owner or admin** | Yes. Owners and admins can sign in to preview the portal. They are not linked to a customer, so they see only requests they submitted themselves. |
| Any other **team member** | No. Agents, managers and other staff roles use the main app. The portal tells them to sign in there instead. |

One email address can belong to several workspaces. After entering the code, such a user picks the workspace to enter. Within one workspace, a portal user belongs to at most one customer.

## What a customer can do

| In the portal | Details |
|---|---|
| **Read the help center and Ask AI** | The public help center never needs an account. Signed-in users also get the **Ask AI** chat when you have enabled it. |
| **Open a ticket** | **New ticket** on the Support tickets page asks for a subject and a message. Screenshots can be pasted or dragged in. |
| **Follow tickets** | A user linked to a customer sees every ticket of that customer; an unlinked user sees only the requests they submitted. The customer sees your public replies, never your internal notes. |
| **Reply** | A reply on a solved or closed ticket reopens it. |
| **Complete onboarding tasks** | Tasks you have published from a board appear on **Home**, grouped by project, for linked users with onboarding access. |
| **Keep their profile up to date** | Name, phone number and time zone on **My Profile**. |

What a customer cannot do in the portal: close or solve a ticket, add people in copy, set a priority, upload files other than images, or change the email address they sign in with. Your team handles each of these from the inbox or from the Portal users page.

## How access is decided

Two settings on each portal user decide what they see, and both live on **Support → Portal users**:

- **Customer**: the customer record the user is linked to. Linking gives the user the company-wide view of tickets and switches on the onboarding **Home** for that customer's boards. See [Link customers, set access and deactivate](./customer-portal-manage-portal-users).
- **Access**: **Full portal**, **Support tickets**, **Onboarding & tasks** or **No access**. Invited users start with the full portal; self sign-ups start with whatever you allow under **What self-signups can access**.

## Where portal tickets go

Every ticket opened in the portal lands in **Support** with the channel *Portal*, the portal user as requester and, for a linked user, their customer attached. Your replies are emailed to the customer and shown in the portal. See [Portal tickets in your inbox](./customer-portal-portal-tickets-for-agents).

Next: [The Portal users page](./customer-portal-portal-users-page).