Available on: Professional, Business plans
Gladly is a service platform that allows you to treat customers like people not tickets.
You can either choose to create a new task or conversation based on a form submission coming in.
Form Setup
Before using the Gladly Plugin you must create a form to collect support requests. Any HTML form will work, as long as it contains "email" and "message" inputs. In addition, there are a few special named inputs you can use to customize the Gladly task.
name="email" (Required)
Your form must contain an input named "email". To take advantage of built-in browser validation, set the input type to "email".
Formspree will use the email address to create a new Gladly customer. If a user already exists with the given email address, it will add the task under that account.
For example:
<input type="email" name="email" placeholder="Your email address" required>
name="message"
Adding an input named "message" or "msg" will set the main text content of the support task. Normally it's best to use a textarea tag for the message, allowing the visitor to type in multiple lines.
While not required server-side, you may want to add the required attribute if you want users to fill this out.
<textarea name="message"></textarea>
Attachments and additional fields
It's also possible to attach files to the task or conversation, for more information see how to upload files. A link will be included in the task to any files that the user has uploaded.
Every other form field will be added to the bottom of the task.
Creating Tasks in Gladly
Using the Gladly plugin, each submission will add a new task to your support helpdesk, including any submission data.
Once you've created and configured a form that, at a minimum, has an input named "email" and "message" you can open a Gladly task using the Gladly plugin. To do so, first, go to the Plugins tab of your form. Then click the Gladly button.
You'll need to specify the subdomain of your Gladly account, the connected email, and the API key.
If you're not familiar with how to retrieve the Gladly API key, please see how to create Gladly API tokens.
Then paste this information into Formspree.
If you aren't ready to send your submissions into your production instance of Gladly, you can enable Test Mode to open tasks in your staging environment. You will use the same subdomain as your production instance.
Once you've authenticated your Gladly account, select an inbox and due date for new tasks.
- Inbox: choose the correct inbox to route tasks to the correct customer service agents. Disabled Gladly inboxes will be greyed out.
- Due date: this will set an internal SLA for new tasks that are created in Gladly. When a task passes the due date, Gladly will highlight it for attention by your customer support team.
In the future, if you'd like to change the list or disable the plugin entirely, you can do so by clicking on the Gladly button again to adjust its settings.
Creating Conversations in Gladly
If you would like to open a conversation in Gladly or benefit from Formspree Routing Rules, you can connect your form to Gladly via email. Please note that due to limitations in how emails are delivered, Formspree cannot identify if a submission is rejected by the receiving mail server when using this option.
Adding a Linked Email
You will want to add the email entrypoint you've configured in Gladly (e.g. support@acme.com) as a linked email in Formspree.
You can add a linked email by visiting the Account tab and clicking + Add Email. Once you verify your email, you will be able to select it as a target email for your form.
Setting Linked Email as Target Email
When you create a new form, you can choose your target email in the new form creation modal.
If you are changing an existing form's email address, it can be done so via the form's Settings tab.