Ticketing forms are an art. Make them too long and hard to fill out and nobody will do them. Make them too light on information and they're useless to you.
The key is to get the right amount of data to display so that you can make the experience of transferring knowledge over from a client to a technician as painless as possible. Below, we'll examine the best tactics to use that will make your forms stand out (and actually get utilized)!
Conditional Statements
Conditional statements help you to take potentially complex information flows and simplify them down into the bare essentials.
Rather than asking the customer for every possible answer to every question, they let you break off the logic into pre-defined paths so you only ask those questions if you have to.
Here's an example - you've got an onboarding form and you need to ask if the new user needs a laptop.
And, if they do, they'll need to answer a few questions about make, model, accessories, and more. But if they don't, they should zoom on by without getting bogged down in irrelevant questions.
Most questions in CloudRadial's form builder can trigger these conditional statements via the Show more options... dialogue at the bottom of questions.
Selecting this will prompt you to hide this question until certain conditions are met - usually when a question's response matches a certain bit of text. Here's an example of what that looks like in action.
When editing tickets, you'll be able to quickly identify which ones are conditional based on the "hidden eye" symbol.
Take extra care to find out what they're triggered if you need to edit them - you don't want to mess up the structure of a ticket by deleting things at random.
Implement conditional statements wherever possible to make complex tickets less daunting for users.
Display Only (HTML) Questions
Show, don't tell. It's something that's especially true for tickets that require some kind of visual medium. If you're asking the user to select something that is particularly unique and/or visual, use the Display Only (text or HTML) to give them a visual so that they have an easier time understanding you.
Here's an example of a ticket that uses the HTML field to help a user understand what kind of desktop they'd be getting if they went ahead and ordered it:
And here's the HTML code used in the ticket.
<img src="https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/iYBN3eoXhii8Juvs8GCQNP-1200-80.jpg.webp" alt="Omen 30L"style="width:500px;height:250px;">
You can easily modify it as you need, or just replace the image link with one that you need for yourself.
Be aware that images are sensitive to screen size and the size of the ticketing blade that pops out of the portal - so you may need to experiment with the right-sized image for your needs.
Images don't just make your tickets easier to fill out - it makes them look cool, too.
Page Break
Filling out a never-ending blast of questions can be gruesome. Sometimes, there's not a way to break them apart with conditional statements - but Page Breaks are the answer.
This question type helps you break out your question forms into dedicated sections that are more palatable and presentable. Here's an example of it being applied to an onboarding form:
Note how much easier and digestible it is to use page breaks rather than ask all the questions in one lump sum. Here's the structure within the ticket itself:
Category
Category question types serve a similar but distinct function from page breaks - they offer a way to separate out question sections within a form without incurring a new tab. They're great to split up mini sections in particularly long stretches.
When used effectively, they help the ticket submitter gauge the length of questions they'll need to answer before reaching the next section, which makes for a smoother transition.
Here's an example of them in action:
And, as usual, here's what they look like on the back end:
Leveraging All Ticket Best Practices
Experiment with each (and maybe all) of the functions listed above in your tickets to create a streamlined, responsive, and easy-to-understand ticketing experience. Doing so will boost your portal usage and enhance the quality of your portal dramatically.
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