Custom roles in Pylon allow you to create granular permission sets for your Contacts, controlling what they can view, edit, and manage within the Customer Portal.

Custom roles enable you to create granular permissions between the built‑in Member and Admin roles. Common use cases include:

• Giving broader ticket visibility without full Admin access

• Enabling specific capabilities (like WhatsApp group chat creation) without full admin permissions

• Customizing task permissions beyond the default view‑only Member access

Standard Roles: Built-in roles provided by Pylon (indicated by Pylon logo)

• Cannot be edited or deleted

• Can be duplicated to create custom variants

• Three default role levels:

  • No Access: Cannot log in to the portal at all

  • Member: Can only see and manage tickets they personally submitted

  • Admin: Can see and manage all tickets for their organization's account, and can manage/invite teammates

Custom Roles: User-created roles with customizable permissions

• Fully editable

• Can be deleted

• Can be duplicated

Permission Types

Each permission category has up to 3 action types:

• View Only: View-only access

• Editor: Create and update access (automatically includes Read)

• No Access: No access at all - a contact with this role cannot log in to the portal and cannot view any issues or data. If you see a contact listed with No Access, there is no data exposure risk.

Custom roles can also be configured with issue filters to control which tickets contacts can view in the portal.

Creating / Editing Contact Roles

Navigate to Contacts and click Manage Portal Roles in the top right, or go to Settings > Portal Roles. From there, edit an existing custom Contact role, or create new ones.

Assigning Roles to Contacts

Via the UI:

• Member is the default role for new contacts

• To change a contact's role, navigate to the account's Contacts tab and update the role assignment

• To set the default portal role for newly created contacts, go to Workspace settings → Customer Portal settings

• You can bulk select contacts and change their portal access at once

Via the API:

• When creating or updating a contact through the API: Use portal_role parameter with values: no_access, member, or admin

• Use portal_role_id parameter to assign a custom role

• If omitted during contact creation, the system automatically assigns the default role configured in your portal settings

For bulk role updates that aren't practical through the UI:

1. Use GET /contacts to list contacts

2. Use PATCH /contacts/{id} with {"portal_role":"member"} to set roles in a loop

This is useful for programmatically setting portal_role for all existing contacts or a filtered set.

Restricting Portal Access by Account Type

To limit Customer Portal access only to contacts from specific account types (e.g., Enterprise accounts):

1. Set the Default Portal Role to "No Access" in Settings > Customer Portal. This prevents contacts from non‑qualifying accounts from accessing the portal.

2. Manually update the portal role for contacts in qualifying accounts using the UI bulk selection feature or the API methods described above.

Alternatively, designate 1‑2 members as Admin on each qualifying account, and they can manage user access as needed.