Available on: Professional, Business plans
Freshdesk is an online cloud-based customer service software providing helpdesk support with all smart automations to get things done faster.
When you connect your form to a Freshdesk account, each submission will add a new ticket to your support help desk, along with the contact name, phone number, address, and much more data if needed.
Form Setup
Before using the Freshdesk Plugin you must create a form to collect support requests. Any HTML form will work, as long as it contains an "email" input. In addition, there are a few special named inputs you can use to customize the Freshdesk ticket and contacts.
name="email" (Required)
Your form can contain an "email" named input. To take advantage of built-in browser validation, set the input type to "email".
Formspree will use the email address to create a new Freshdesk contact. If a user already exists with the given email address, it will add the ticket under that account.
For example:
<input type="email" name="email" placeholder="Your email address" required>
name="name"
Adding an input named "name", or using "firstName" and "lastName" inputs, will set the user's name on the ticket.
This is an optional field.
<input type="text" name="firstName" placeholder="Your first name">
<input type="text" name="lastName" placeholder="Your last name">or
<input type="text" name="name" placeholder="Your full name">
name="subject"
Adding an input named "subject" will set the subject line of the ticket. When implementing your form you may choose to use a text input and allow the user to provide their own subject line. For example:
<input type="text" name="subject" placeholder="What's the subject of your request?">Alternatively, you may choose to use a select input, allowing your visitor to select from a list of predefined subjects. For example:
<select name="subject">
<option value="Technical Support Request">Technical Support Request</option>
<option value="Sales Request">Sales Request</option>
</select>
name="message" (Required)
Adding an input named "message" or "msg" will set the main text content of the support ticket. Normally it's best to use a textarea tag for the message, allowing the visitor to type in multiple lines.
<textarea name="message"></textarea>
name="priority"
An input named "priority" can be used to set the priority of the Freshdesk ticket. This can be a select tag, allowing the user to specify the request priority. Alternatively, you can set the priority explicitly using a hidden input field. The value of the input must be one of "low", "normal", "high", or "urgent".
Default is "low".
This is an optional field.
Examples:
<select name="priority">
<option value="low">Low</option>
<option value="normal">Normal</option>
<option value="high">High</option>
<option value="urgent">Urgent</option>
</select>
<input type="hidden" name="priority" value="high">or
<input type="hidden" name="priority" value="high">
name="urgent"
An input named "urgent" can be used to set the priority of the Freshdesk ticket to urgent. This can be implemented as a checkbox input, allowing the user to request urgent attention. Any non-empty value for the "urgent" input will cause the ticket's priority to be set to urgent.
This is an optional field.
Default is false.
<input type="checkbox" name="urgent" value="true">
name="tags"
An input named "tags" can be used to add tags to the ticket. You should send the tags split by a comma.
This is an optional field.
<input type="text" name="tags" value="nice tag, another tag">Freshdesk Additional Fields
Freshdesk provides several additional fields you can use to set the metadata on tickets, and even allows you to customize the ticket fields to contain custom fields specific to your business or your support process.
On the Formspree side, these fields are mapped according to the agent label. The value must be the exact name as specified in the agent label, except without case sensitivity.
Example:
If you create a field with the agent label set as "Additional Contact Phone" like bellow:
Your form should contain the field:
<input type="text" name="text" value="additional contact phone">
Formspree backend validates some field types that means if you create a number, decimal, checkbox, or dropdown field the following validations are implicit:
- Number fields must be integers (1, 2305, 1993)
- Decimal fields must have decimal places split by comma or dot (1.0, 12.07, 1.994)
- Checkbox fields must be present on submission to be checked and not present or empty to be unchecked
- Dropdown fields must be one of the added choices following the same rules for the custom name fields. If a choice agent label is "Very Satisfied" the value sent by the form must match the name case insensitive.
Connecting to Freshdesk
Note: If you're using the Formspree CLI please instead refer to our article Create support tickets in Freshdesk to connect to Freshdesk.
Once you've created and configured a form that, at a minimum, has an input named "email" and "message" you can connect to Freshdesk using the Freshdesk Plugin. To do so, first, go to the Plugins tab of your form. Then click the Freshdesk Plugin button.
You'll need to specify the subdomain of your Freshdesk account and the API Key. See how to get your API Key.
Once you've connected you'll see Freshdesk settings modal:
In the future, if you'd like to change the list or disable the plugin entirely, you can do so by clicking on the Freshdesk button again to adjust its settings.