Forms

​Contact form

Helpfruit comes with a pre-configured email contact form. Completed entries will be sent to the email address specified on sign up.

Review your contact form and make changes via the Forms menu:

Contact forms are triggered when a user needs help or the bot can’t answer their question.

They can also be linked to questions, so when a user enters “contact” or "get in touch", for example, the Contact form is triggered.

Form builder

Use the Forms page in the Helpfruit portal to set up your forms

Forms are publishable. This means that if you are working on a form and don’t want to expose it yet, you can save it as a draft and continue later.

Any existing forms can be edited via this screen too.

Form types

When you create a new form, you will first get to select the type of form:

• An email form sends the data collected in the form by email to a specified address
• An API form calls a specified API - and can be used to send and/or retrieve data from a back-end system (eg CRM)
• Context collection forms collect user context for use in other bot functions - for example, as a pre-live chat step, collecting the name and/or contact details of the user. In these forms, data is not sent anywhere else. Context keys must be set up first. Contact the Helpfruit team if you'd like to set up a context collection form.

Form configuration

Forms have a few general settings:

• Name (required) – name of the form. Used for display/identification
• Published (optional) - you can save a form as a draft and publish it when you’re ready.
  • If a form isn’t published it won’t be available in Q&A or to the user in chat.
• Welcome Response (required) – message sent to the user when they start the form
• Completed Response (required) – a message sent to the user upon form completion
• Exit Text (optional) – a message sent to the user if they exit/cancel the form
• Processing Text (optional) – a message sent to the user when a request could take longer than expected (this could happen, for example, with an API based form)

Form Fields

Form Fields are the questions the bot will ask the user to answer.

Each form field includes:

• Field Name
• Field Type, used for input validation (most common field types are Text and Email)
• Bot Question, the question the bot will ask the user to collect the required information

You can rearrange the order of form fields using the arrows on the right. This changes the order questions are asked to the user.

If you would like to store data collected in the form (eg so the user doesn't have to type it again), make sure your form fields have corresponding context keys.

Include collected data in form responses and email notifications

You can personalise your completed form message by adding {{name}} (or any other fieldname, in the format {{fieldName}}):

You can also add substitutions in your email subject line, for email forms - 

​Form Actions

Email forms

Send an email to your desired recipient with the data your user has entered.

Email forms include the following settings:

• Email To – where to send the form data (separate multiple addresses with a semi-colon eg [email protected];[email protected])
• Subject – the subject line of the email sent. You can add dynamic elements to the subject: 
  {{timestamp}} - the unix timestamp of the time the form was submitted - provides a unique identifier
  {{fieldName}} - any field(s) in your form. If the name of the form field is 2 or more words, delete spaces and start subsequent word with a capital letter, eg {{emailAddress}} 

API forms

You can also make forms which will call a specified API
You must specify the endpoint you would like the request to be sent to, along with any query parameters you require other than the ones we may potentially add to your endpoint.
 
We have two request types:

• Request – Make a single request to the endpoint specified, a response is not expected
• Request and Response – Make a single request to the endpoint specified and expect a response back which complies with our guidelines on response structure

We support GET and POST request methods.
For GET Requests, query parameters are added to your endpoint, which are form fields and their respective values. You must assign which ones to capture and use as query parameters
For POST Requests, a body is sent with the following JSON structure:

You can add any headers you may need to your request (Content-Type needs to be JSON if posting data and is set by default if not set manually).

Context collection

Forms can be set up to collect user context for use in other bot functions - for example, as a pre-live chat step, collecting the name and/or contact details of the user. In these forms, data is not sent anywhere else. Context keys must be set up first. Learn more

Zendesk forms

for more info on our Zendesk forms and integration, see our detailed help guide