Sign up forms in portals
Portals are designed to extend the organization's CRM account to customers, vendors, or partners. Portal users can have access to the modules and fields provided to them. In some cases, the portal users might also have access to edit records.
Not all customers will have access to the portal; only valid customers are added to the portal. Users are added to the portal via two ways:
- Being invited from Zoho CRM
- Signing up using portal forms
Portal Forms
The main purpose of the portal form is to allow customers, vendors, and partners to invite themselves to the organization's portal account. Only valid customers are added to the portal account. Zoho CRM validates the customer before they are added to the portal account.
Portal forms are quite similar to webforms; all the amenities used in webforms are also available in portal forms. Analytics can be also be done for portal forms, and you can also run A/B testing on them.
Creating a Portal Form
To create a portal form:
- Navigate to Setup > Channels > Portals .
- Choose the portal user type you want to create a portal form for.
- Once you are inside the portal user type tab, click the three dots in the top-right corner.
- Click the Manage Portal Forms .
- A new tab will open containing the existing portal forms as well as the option to Create Portal Form . You can edit the already existing form or create a new form, as needed.If you are editing a existing portal form, you will be redirected to the form builder page. If you are creating a new form, you will need to enter some standard details before moving to the form builder page.
- The type is Portal Form by default, as this is created from the portal page. Provide the necessary details in the New Form popup. You will be redirected to the form builder page.
A user must have both the Manage Webforms and Manage Portals permissions in order to build portal forms. Form builder
For portal forms, the Zoho CRM provides fields needed for account creation by default. You can also use other available fields by clicking and dragging them into the builder.
Once you create the form, you can preview the view before publishing it by clicking the Preview button.
Click Next, then provide the needed details in the popup:
- The portal homepage is the landing page for any portal form. It cannot be modified.
- The owner of the record can be selected directly, or you can choose the assignment rule option.
- You can also use tags for the form.
- Double Opt-in is enabled by default. It cannot be disabled as only valid customers are to be allowed into the portal.
- A notification can also be sent to the contact's owner.
Click Save to generate the Signup URL. Copy the URL and get the form hosted.
Once the portal form is live, any of your customers that fill in the data will get an OTP to their email address.
Validating portal users
Once the portal form is available on the organization's website, the customers can now access the company's portal directly. Only legitimate customers can be added into the portal, so an OTP is sent after they submit the form to validate them.
Customers need OTP only during the first signup. Post that, they can log in using their credentials.
The customer will only be logged in to the portal after they verify themselves using the OTP.
Customizing welcome emails
A system-generated welcome email will be sent to the customers after they become a portal user. The welcome email can be customized accordingly. To do so:
- Navigate to Setup > Channels > Portals > User Type .
- Click the more (...) icon and choose Custom Email Templates .
- Modify the template as needed. Always remember to add the portal URL link in the email template. An error message is thrown if the portal URL is not added in the email template.
- Click Save Template .
Errors during form submission
There are times where the portal form will throw some errors when it has been submitted. Some of the major errors include:
- Portal form deactivated : This error is thrown when the portal form is disabled. As the portal form is disabled, the OTP is also not generated. This likewise means no portal user is created. However, the details about the customer are sent to the CRM user as an email.
- Portal user type is deactivated : This error is thrown when the specific user type is deactivated. When a portal user type is disabled, all the portal forms inside that particular portal user type are also disabled. Even after you enable the portal user type, the portal forms will still be disabled. The user has to manually activate it again.
- Portal user is deactivated : This error is thrown when the portal user is deactivated.
- Limit exceeded : This error is thrown when the portal user limit is exceeded in the CRM account.Consider this example: Zylker Real Estates has a maximum of 500 portal users license count. In case if the total number of portal users exceeds 500, the users are not allowed inside the portal. However, the users that enter into the portal are potential customers, so it is important not to lose them. So, every time a customer signs up to the portal after the limit is exceeded, they are stored in a different view. They are not directly added into to the portal, and are listed in the Waiting for Portal Approval view.
To view this, navigate to Setup > Channel > Portals > Any Portal User Type > Waiting for Portal Access .Every time a customer enters in to the portal access page, the CRM user gets a notification regarding the same. For customers inside this Waiting for Portal Access list, the CRM user has to grant them access manually.Before doing that, the CRM user has to purchase additional portal user count. Zoho CRM also supports bulk actions, such as bulk approval, bulk rejection, and so on.The maximum limit count for Waiting for Portal Access is 100. After 100 customer sign-ups are stored, any customer attempting to sign up will not be saved here. The details about those customers will be sent in an email to the CRM user, and they will have to add them to the portal manually.
In the portal user type page, you can see the portal user count available for your account. From here, you can purchase the portal user licenses directly.
Edition Limitations
- For the trial edition, only one portal form can be created.
- Portal forms is supported in Enterprise and Ultimate editions. Five portal forms can be created per user type.
- User count for Waiting for portal access view:
- For the trial edition, the system can hold 10 users.
- For paid editions, the system can hold 100 users.
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