Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://help.idibilling.com/llms.txt

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IDI version 26.8 is now available.  Click here for details: IDI Updates.

About Customer Portal

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IDI’s Customer Portal is an intuitive digital platform that lets your subscribers be more self-sufficient in managing their bills and helps you significantly reduce support costs and call volumes​. Subscribers can quickly and easily register for a customer portal account and then have access to the following self-service functions:

  • View summary account information and manage passwords.

  • View service and product details for an account.

  • View current and historical usage data.

  • View bills and download PDFs.

  • Manage information related to contacts, notifications, and their user profile.

  • Make one-time payments and set up auto-pay accounts.

  • Manage paperless billing options.

The portal is designed for optimal display on desktop, tablet, and mobile screen sizes. It supports all browsers; however, Edge, Chrome or Safari is recommended for best results. Any device with a web browser is supported. Specific interface experiences are provided for handheld, tablet, and desktop form factors.

Flexible configuration options let you control branding and subscriber capabilities on a market basis. An open framework and APIs support integration to your existing systems and third-party applications.​

All portal configuration and user administration is done in Customer Care. This means your customer service representatives are no longer required to have special permissions in the Security module to manage customer accounts.

To facilitate transitioning from OnlineBill to Customer Portal, your subscribers will not have to re-register their OnlineBill accounts or reset their passwords. OnlineBill accounts are automatically migrated to the Customer Portal. And you can use both applications in production at the same time to further ease the transition.

Note: Customer Portal is available as a purchasable feature and is not included in the SaaS hosting fee. A fully functional preview version of the application is available to all customers for evaluation; however, a message will be displayed on every page indicating the version is for preview only.

Prerequisites

  • The Customer Portal is a platform application, meaning it is not subject to versioning. The initial release is available as of January 2024.  IDI platform version 24.1 and higher is required for administrative functions in Customer Care.  

  • Paymentus is the only supported payment processor for Customer Portal, so you’ll need to establish a relationship with Paymentus prior to deploying this functionality.

  • Customer Portal requires you to have the Communications web module enabled to run in your system. If you don't currently use Communications, contact your account manager to arrange for this. 

Licensing

Customer Portal is available with two licensing options.

  • Standard license: provides standard electronic bill payment and presentment

  • Self-Service license: includes standard capability plus the following additional capabilities

    • Tickets integration

    • Chat (using Team Support)

    • Custom Pages (may require customer engineering)

Contact your account manager to arrange for a licensing to meet your requirements.

Note that using the portal in Preview mode (with no license) provides access to both standard and self-service capabilities with a preview banner on the application.

This article focuses on how to set up and administer the Customer Portal application.

What’s New

Version

Enhancements

25.11

New page for viewing and exporting customer portal users

The Administration menu has a new Users option that displays a page for viewing and exporting Customer Portal users.

25.8

Single Sign-On and Customizing the Portal View for Subscribers

This release provides enhancements to improve administrators' and end-users' overall experience:

  • Seamless Single Sign-On (SSO): Enables your subscribers to log in to the Customer Portal using a third-party identity provider such as Okta, Microsoft, or Ping.  This helps your subscribers by easing password fatigue. You benefit by reducing the volume of service requests related to password maintenance. Additionally, if you offer a self-service portal using an internal or third-party application, such as Salesforce Experience Cloud, SSO lets your subscribers seamlessly navigate from that portal to the IDI Customer Portal, and use the same log-in credentials to access both.

  • Customizable portal Settings view: Customer Portal administrators can customize the user experience by choosing to show or hide specific elements. Administrators now have the ability to enable or disable submenus and subsections.

Setup requirements for SSO are covered in the Customer Portal Administration section. To see how SSO works, refer to How SSO Works.

Service Summary Export

Subscribers can now export a list of their services and associated features directly from the Plans & Services page in the Customer Portal. This is equivalent to the functionality that has been available in OnlineBill. While this enhancement is provided with a Customer Portal platform deployment, it is still dependent on having IDI platform version 25.8.

25.4

Chat integration

Chat integration provides a way for subscribers to access support and reduce call volumes to support representatives. Note: Currently, TeamSupport is the only supported chat provider. If you need to configure a different provider, contact your Account Manager.

Administrators can configure TeamSupport as the chat provider for a profile. Subscribers can use TeamSupport chat capability from within Customer Portal.

25.3

Traversing corporate structure on corporate accounts

The portal view for corporate accounts has been enhanced to facilitate traversing the entire corporate structure. The Account Summary page for any parent-level account (one that has child-level accounts) has a new navigation option for viewing the corporate structure. It opens a new Corporate Account page. From there:

  • For each child account that has billing-active children, you can click to view their children and traverse the corporate tree.

  • A search option on the Corporate Account page lets you search by account number or customer name.

  • You can change your view of Customer Portal to any descendent account. Doing this opens the Customer Portal for the selected descendent account.

  • When viewing another account, you have an option to return to the original account.

Not Invoice Responsible (NIR) users will not have access to the Manage Wallet, Manage Autopay, and Make Payment pages. This restriction is in place to prevent misapplying payments, which could lead to issues requiring customer support.

25.2

Ticket integration and helpful links

These self-service enhancements can help you reduce call volume and related expenses for your service centers.

  • Integrating IDI tickets functionality lets your subscribers open and view tickets via their portals. Tickets are presented to subscribers as support requests.

  • The ability to add links (urls) on the Support page gives your subscribers quick access to helpful information.

Account lock indicators for Port Outs and SIM Changes

In support of FCC compliance guidelines, this lets subscribers indicate when SIM changes and/or port outs are prohibited on their accounts. This is similar to the account lock functionality for Customer Care provided in the 24.11 release.

With this functionality:

  • Providers can set up portal profiles to enable/disable subscribers’ ability to set and view account lock settings for SIM changes and port outs.

  • Subscribers can set and view account lock status when the functionality is enabled for them.

Note: These settings and corresponding indicators are for information only to provide a warning not to perform these actions. They do not prevent users from performing these actions.

For more on this, refer to the article on Account Lock Indicators for Port Out and SIM Changes in the IDI Knowledge Center.

24.11

Broadband labeling

In compliance with FCC order 22-86 for broadband service providers, the Plans & Services page in Customer Portal provides a visual indicator and a clickable link when a service has a broadband label. The link is named View Broadband Facts. Clicking it displays the corresponding broadband label.

24.1

Initial release