Contact forms

Partly available

Build a contact form, publish it as a link or on any page of your store, swap it in for email links, and sort its tickets with rules and views.

On this page

A contact form asks customers for what your team needs on the first message: a subject from your list, their order number and a few photos. Each message becomes a ticket on the Contact form channel, and your team answers it by email. Only admins create and change forms; everyone else can view them.

You need a mailbox for the answers. Connect one in Settings > Email, with Gmail or forwarding, before you publish. Without one the form still takes messages, but agents can only add internal notes to them.

Create a form#

Open Settings > Contact form and click Create contact form.
Fill in Name (only your team sees it), Language and Replies come from, the mailbox your answers go out from.
Click Create contact form. The form opens on its Customization tab.

Language sets the form's labels and messages, and its starting subjects: English, French, German or Spanish. You can change it later on the Preferences tab, where the name, mailbox and Delete form also live.

Customize it#

The Customization tab has a live preview of the real form beside it.

Setting	What it does
Subjects	What customers choose from, in this order. Drag them or use the arrows to reorder; up to 20, each once. With no subjects, customers type their own. The form starts with Where is my order, Returns and exchanges, Problem with an order, and Product question.
"Other"	Adds a last choice with a box for the customer to type a subject.
Name	Required or Optional.
Order number	Required, Optional or Don't ask. It appears on the ticket under the customer's message.
Attachments	On or off. Customers can attach up to 3 files, 4 MB in total: pictures (PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, HEIC), PDF or plain text.
Heading, Intro, After sending	The title, a line under it (such as when you answer), and the thank-you text.
Colour	The button, focus outlines and links. Seven swatches or any hex code; text on a light colour turns dark.

Email and message are always required. Click Save changes to keep your changes.

Publish it#

The Publish tab gives you three ways in:

Form link: a page of its own, at an address like https://cs.growthdept.ai/f/yourhelpdesk/…, showing your helpdesk's name above the form. Put it in your site's menu, an email footer or an order confirmation. Search engines do not list it.
Script tag: paste it where the form should appear, such as a custom HTML block in your page builder or your contact page's template. It draws the form in place and keeps its height matched to the form.
Iframe: for editors that do not allow scripts. It is 760 pixels tall; change the height to fit your page.

On Shopify, paste the script tag into a Custom Liquid section on your contact page, or into the page's template. Adding the form to your store without code, through a theme extension, is not built.

The form works with JavaScript switched off in the visitor's browser, and keeps what the customer typed when something needs fixing.

Replace the email links on your site#

A mailto: link or a printed support address invites spam: bots collect addresses from pages and mail them. Link to the form instead, from your contact page, footer and order emails. Your address stays off the page, and the form drops automated posts before they become tickets: a hidden field that only bots fill in, a check that the form was not sent within seconds of opening, and limits on how many messages one connection can send. There is no CAPTCHA.

Keep your mailbox connected. The form's tickets are answered from it, and customers who already have your address can still write to it.

Tickets from the form#

The ticket's channel is Contact form. Its subject is the one the customer chose or typed, and its language is the form's.
The customer is found by email address, or created.
The order number is the last line of the message, and attachments come with it.
Your reply goes out as an email from the form's mailbox. The customer's answer to that email joins the same ticket.
Satisfaction surveys can be sent for contact form tickets; see Satisfaction surveys.

Sort them with views and rules#

Because the channel and subject are on every ticket, you can build on them in views and rules:

Goal	How
A queue of form tickets	A view with Channel is Contact form.
Tag by subject	A rule on ticket created: when Channel is Contact form and Subject contains "Returns", add the tag `returns`.
Route to a team	The same condition, with the action to assign a team.
An instant answer for one subject	A rule that replies when the subject is "Where is my order", with your shipping times and tracking link.
Tell two forms apart	Give each form its own subjects, or a rule that tags by subject, since the form's name is not a condition.

Self-service above the form#

Order tracking, returns and short answers shown before the form, so customers can help themselves without opening a ticket, are not built for contact forms. The Self-service tab shows what they would add. Order lookups and guided flows are available in chat instead.

Delete a form#

Delete form on the Preferences tab stops its link and embeds taking messages; they say the form is no longer in use. Tickets it opened stay. Remove the embed code from your site too.

Still stuck?

Write to the Growth Dept team and a person answers. Say which helpdesk you work in and what you were trying to do.

support@growthdept.ai