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Has anyone set up the customer portal? Is it worth it?

Lindsey Park

Sorry if this is a silly question, but I've been going back and forth on whether to set up the customer portal for our clients. We're a mid-sized HVAC company with about 35 technicians and I've been the one handling most of the FieldPulse admin stuff since we switched over from our old system back in March.

So here's where I'm at — I keep getting calls from customers asking "when is my technician coming" and "can I see my invoice online" and honestly it's taking up a lot of my time when I'm also trying to handle scheduling conflicts and parts ordering and about fifteen other things. The customer portal seems like it could help with that? But I'm also worried about...

Okay, let me just list out what I'm worried about because that's easier:

  • Will customers actually use it or will they just keep calling anyway?
  • How much work is it to set up on my end? I don't have a ton of time for configuration right now
  • Can they see everything or can I limit what they see? (We had some issues with our old system where customers could see notes we didn't intend...)
  • What happens if they try to self-schedule and we can't actually accommodate the time they picked?

I guess my main question is whether anyone here has actually rolled this out and felt like it was worth the effort. I'd love to hear real experiences — the good and the bad. We're trying to be more "digital" as a company but I also don't want to create more headaches for myself if this is going to be something I have to babysit.

Thanks so much for any insights! Really appreciate this community — I've learned a lot just from reading everyone's posts.

  • Pro tip: start small and expand. We turned on customer portal about a year ago for just our commercial accounts first — maybe 15 customers. Gave us time to work out the notification settings and figure out what customers actually cared about.

    The self-scheduling question you asked is a real thing. We don't let customers pick their own time slots through the portal. Instead they can request a callback or indicate preferred morning/afternoon, and our dispatcher still books the actual appointment. Saved us a ton of "but I picked Tuesday at 2pm" conversations when we're already triple-booked that day.

    Setup took me maybe two hours? Most of it was just deciding which checkboxes to hit. The bigger time sink was updating our phone message and email footer to mention the portal exists. Customers won't use what they don't know about.

    Happy to share our notification settings if that helps.

  • We tried it... three years ago? Took it back off after six months.

    Problem wasn't the portal itself, it was our customer base. Residential HVAC, older demographic, they wanted to call. Portal got maybe 40 logins total out of 800+ active customers. Not worth the "where do I click" phone calls we started getting.

    Might be different if you're more commercial or B2B. YMMV.

  • in reply to Josh Mercer

    Oh this is really helpful! I hadn't thought about starting with just commercial accounts — that's actually a great idea since ours tend to be more patient with new systems (and they have office managers who actually check email, unlike some of our residential customers...). Would you mind sharing those notification settings? I'm especially curious about how you handled the "don't let them self-schedule" part — is that just a setting or did you have to work around it?

    Also did you run into any issues with customers seeing technician notes or internal comments? That's probably my biggest fear honestly.

  • in reply to Ray DeLuca

    Ray, that's such a good point about knowing your customer base! We're more mixed — about 60% commercial and 40% residential — and we've definitely seen that split. Our commercial accounts love being able to pull up their service history for their own records, but our residential customers mostly just want someone to answer the phone when their AC dies in July.

    We ended up keeping the portal active but stopped promoting it to residential. Just didn't have the bandwidth to support both workflows equally. Thanks so much for sharing your experience — it's helpful to know when something didn't work out!

  • Hi Lindsey! Love that you're thinking through this strategically. We want to make sure you're set up for success with whatever you decide.

    A few things that might help with your specific concerns:

    Visibility controls — You have granular control over what customers can see. Internal notes, technician comments, and cost breakdowns you're not ready to share can all be hidden. The Customer Portal Beta announcement has a good overview of the permission settings.

    Self-scheduling — This is configurable. You can enable appointment requests (which still flow to your dispatch queue for confirmation) or turn scheduling off entirely for portal users.

    Adoption — We've seen the most success when teams treat portal rollout as a change management project, not just a checkbox. Your point about updating phone messages and email signatures is spot on, Josh.

    Happy to connect you with a couple of customers who've done this recently if you'd like to hear directly from peers in your industry. Just let me know!