The Zendesk Contact Form
The Zendesk contact form in your help centre is the only part of Zendesk your customers ever configure their way through. Most are twice as long as they need to be.
What the Zendesk contact form is made of
The contact form is a ticket form with its fields marked visible to end users. There is no separate form builder: you make a field, decide whether customers can see it, and it appears in the help centre.
That means everything true of ticket forms is true here, including conditional fields, which are the single most useful thing on this page, and everything true of custom fields applies to the questions you put on it.
The fields worth asking for
Start from four and justify anything beyond them.
After that, add fields only when an agent would otherwise have to ask. Order number for an ecommerce team. Account or site name for B2B. Version number if you ship software.
And make them conditional. The order number field should appear when somebody picks "Problem with my order" and stay hidden the rest of the time.
How the answers feed routing
The routing dropdown is the point of the whole exercise. It's a field value, so a trigger can read it, assign the group, set priority and apply a tag on creation, before any human has looked.
Get this right and your first response time improves without hiring anybody, because the ticket arrives in the correct queue instead of sitting in a general one until somebody triages it.
Two rules for the dropdown. Write the options as things customers say, not as team names. And never make "Other" the first option, because a meaningful share of people will select it without reading further, and every one of those needs manual triage.
Why long forms lose people
Every required field is a chance for somebody to give up. That isn't a theory about web forms, it's what happens in support specifically, and the failure is worse than an abandoned form because of where those people go instead.
They email your general address. They reply to an old ticket. They message you on social. They fill in half the form, decide the account ID field is too much effort, and write in through a different channel entirely.
Occasionally they do both, five minutes apart, and now the same problem exists twice in your queue with different reference numbers. A long form doesn't stop people contacting you. It just moves the contact somewhere less structured, and sometimes it doubles it. If that sounds familiar, the duplicate ticket cost calculator puts a number on it.
Sign-in, attachments and spam
Requiring sign-in before submitting kills spam and gives you a verified requester. It also blocks the customer who can't log in, which is often exactly why they're contacting you. If you require sign-in, publish a route for account access problems that doesn't need an account.
Turn attachments on. A screenshot saves an entire round trip, and round trips are where resolution time goes.
For spam on an open form, Zendesk offers a CAPTCHA for anonymous submissions. Use it before you consider requiring registration, since it costs your genuine users far less.
Last thing, and it's the cheapest win on this page: put your help centre search above the form, not beside it. Some proportion of people are about to ask a question you've already answered, and they will only see the answer if it's in front of them before the text box is.
Frequently asked questions
Is the help centre form the same as the web form channel?
Yes. The Zendesk help center contact form is the Zendesk support request form your customers fill in, and tickets from it arrive tagged as the Zendesk web form channel.
How many fields should a Zendesk contact form have?
Four to six visible at any one time. Use conditional fields so the person only sees the ones relevant to the request type they picked.
Can I customise the Zendesk submit a request form?
Yes, through ticket fields marked visible to end users, conditional field rules, and the help centre theme for layout and wording.
Should customers have to sign in to submit a ticket?
It reduces spam and verifies identity, but it blocks anyone who can't log in. If you require it, offer a separate route for account access problems.
How do I stop spam through the contact form?
Enable the CAPTCHA for anonymous submissions first. It costs genuine users much less than forcing registration on everyone.
One problem, two submissions
When a form frustrates somebody, they contact you again another way. Ticket Merger joins the two tickets back together.
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