Custom forms

Forms let you collect structured information inside a conversation instead of sending people to a separate page they will not fill in.

Two places a form appears

Pre-chat — before the conversation starts. Use it to capture the minimum you need to reply if the visitor disappears, and to route the conversation to the right place.

In-chat — during the conversation, triggered by an agent or by the bot. Use it when the conversation has established that you need something specific: a booking request, an order number, a file.

What to ask for

The instinct is to ask for everything while you have their attention. Resist it — every field costs you completions, and under GDPR every field is also something you have to justify, protect and delete on request. See GDPR and data requests.

A pre-chat form that works is usually two fields:

• Email address — the one field genuinely worth insisting on, because it is what makes the conversation survivable if they leave.
• What they need — either free text or a small set of options you can route on.

Name is optional and rarely changes anything. Phone number reliably reduces completion, so only ask when you actually intend to call.

Routing on the answer

If your pre-chat form asks “what can we help with?” with defined options — sales, existing order, technical problem — you can use the answer to route the conversation to the right agent and to pick which canned responses are relevant. That is worth more than any other pre-chat field.

Qualification for lead generation

If chat is a sales channel, the form is where qualification happens. Ask conversationally and in the order a human would: what they are trying to do first, budget or scale second, timeline last. A form that opens with “what’s your budget?” performs exactly as badly as you would expect.

More on this: lead generation chatbot and live chat lead generation.

Where the data goes

Submissions land against the conversation in your inbox, and can be pushed to your other tools in real time — see Zapier and webhooks.

Offline forms

When no agent is online, the widget should collect a message and an email rather than implying a live reply. That is configured with widget customisation, and it is the highest-value form on most sites simply because it runs for sixteen hours a day.

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