Overview

Most support organizations receive many types of questions from their customers, ranging from technical support to sales inquiries. Forms let you customize the data you collect for different types of support conversations. When your customers click on the Start a conversation link in the Help Center, they will choose the type of help they need, which will take them to the proper form.

Diagnosis

Forms are often your customer's first point of contact with your support team. They will be using forms to communicate the problems they are facing which is why it is very important that you design your forms thoughtfully. The better designed your initial questions are, the easier it will be to solve your customer's problems quickly.

When a customer contacts your team, Kayako immediately creates a conversation using all of the information captured in the form. This means that you can use custom forms to get proactive about the kind of information you see in your support conversations. You can also create custom forms that are not visible to your customers at all. Your support team can use these internal forms to categorize specific types of conversations, without exposing the forms to your customers.

When customizing forms, you start out with a set of standard system fields that Kayako includes on every form. From there, you can choose to add as many custom fields as you like to request specific details from your customers. You need to create the custom fields that you want to use before you start building your form.

The image below shows an example of a form.

Customizing Forms

Customizing your forms ensures that your support team gets the information they need, right out of the gate.

As an example, let's say you want to add a custom form for support conversations about broken or malfunctioning products. Let's walk through the creation of a product repair form that's designed to gather information not only about the customer and their problem but also the specific details of the product they are using. Remember that you will need to create custom fields for any product-specific data you want to collect before you can add them to a form.

Prerequisites

• To add or edit forms in Kayako, you will need an Administrator account with the 'Manage conversation fields' permission.

Solution

To create a new form:

1. Sign in to Kayako and go to the Admin area.
2. Under the Conversations heading, click Forms.
3. Here, you will see a list of all of the forms that have already been created. Click the New form button to start customizing a new one.
4. In the Form title for agents field, add a descriptive internal title for the form. For example, Product Repair Form.
   
   Note: This title is internal, and will appear in the admin area but not to customers.
5. Next, since we want this form to appear as an option when customers are starting new conversations, check the Customers can see and select this form box.
   
   Note: If you were creating a form for internal use only, you would leave this box unchecked.
6. In the Form title for customers field, add a descriptive title for your customers. This title will appear under the heading 'What kind of help do you need?' so let's go with something like 'My product is malfunctioning or broken'.
7. In the Form description for customers field, add a brief description to clarify the kind of information we're asking. For example, 'Please enter your product details and a description of the problems you're experiencing, so we can find a solution for you quickly!'.
   
   
8. If you are supporting multiple brands, the Brand drop-down menu will be available so you can select which brand this form will be available to. The form can be linked to specific Brands. If you have a single brand, then you may skip this step.
9. Under the Forms fields heading, you can see a list of standard '(System)' fields that are included in every form by default. You can't edit or removed these fields since Kayako needs this information to start a new conversation.

   
   
   

10. At the bottom of the list, click the Add new field dropdown to see a list of additional fields.
    
    Note: If you do not see any additional fields here, you'll need to create them using custom fields.
11. Select any additional fields you want in the order you would like them to appear on the form. For this example, we might want to add 'Product Model' and 'Serial Number' fields.
12. If you add a field by accident, you can remove it by hovering over it on the list and clicking the Remove from form link that appears.
13. When you have added the fields you want, click the Save button at the bottom of the page to create your new form.

Confirmation

After customizing your form, your customers will now be able to use it when contacting your team from the Help Center. When a customer clicks on Start a conversation from the Help Center, they will be presented with options (if you built multiple forms) that asks them "What kind of help do you need?". In which case, when they select from any of the options, it'll take them to the designated form.

REMINDER: To make sure the form is visible to customers, it should be in the enabled list in the Forms admin panel, and the option 'Customers can see and select this form' is checked (step 5 above). If the form is disabled, hover over to it and click Enable.