Request form for your website

A request form is a simple "contact us" form for your website, or a direct link to it if you have no website, and the same form right in your chat window. A visitor leaves a name, phone, email and what they need, and sees "Thank you, your request has been sent. We will get back to you." There is no chat and no bot: you get a conversation in your panel, a push notification and an email with the request and the contact. You turn it on in the cabinet; it is off by default and available on every plan.

What the visitor sees

The form has the fields of your request inbox (by default Name, Phone and Email), a text field How can we help? and a Send request button. The text is required, and so is at least one of the phone and the email, so that you have a way to answer. After sending, the form is replaced with the thank you message. The visitor does not get an email confirming the request.

The form takes the colors, font and rounding of your web chat, and speaks the language of the page it is on. If the inbox has a fixed language, the form uses it, the same as the chat window.

The phone field starts with a country: the region of the page or browser language (for example et-EE gives Estonia), otherwise the country of your platform language (English names no country: the platform's one English is used by companies everywhere), otherwise none, and the visitor picks it from the list or types the number with + and the country code. The chat window's own pre-chat form picks the country the same way.

Turn it on in the cabinet

1. Open the cabinet, section Site, card Requests from your website.
2. Press Turn on the request form.

In a few seconds the card shows the code for your website, a direct link and a live preview of the form. Requests from the preview are not sent.

Put the form on your website

The code is one line:

<script async src="https://widget.epavdesk.com/f/form.js" data-instance="https://your-support-address" data-inbox="YOUR_INBOX_ID"></script>

Paste it where the form should be, as an HTML block. The form appears in place of the code, and its height follows its content.

• Tilda: Block Library > Other, block T123 Embed HTML Code, paste the code and publish the page.
• Wix: Add Elements > Embed Code > Popular Embeds > Embed HTML, Enter Code, paste the code and press Apply. Wix keeps embedded code in a frame of its own height, so stretch the element to about 650 pixels.
• WordPress: a Custom HTML block on the page.
• Your own website: the line in the page markup. To show the form inside a particular element, add data-target="element-id" to the tag. data-lang="de" sets the language of the form when it should differ from the page.

Without a website, use the direct link from the card: in your Instagram profile, your Google business profile, on a business card or in a QR code. The link opens the form on its own page with your logo and brand name at the top.

The form in your chat window

Turning the form on also brings it into your chat window, with two switches in the same card, both on by default:

• Show in the chat window. The home screen of your chat gets a card Leave a request. It opens the form right in the chat window, not in a new tab. After sending, the visitor sees the thank you message, and in a few seconds the chat goes back to where the visitor came from (or at once with Back). The card alone is enough for the home screen to appear, even without your own cards. A chat that opens straight into the conversation (Widget type AI chat on the Designer tab, or Launch directly into conversation) has no home screen and no card.
• Offer a request outside working hours. When your team is not at work and a conversation needs a person, a line "Don't want to wait? Leave a request and we will get back to you." with a Leave a request button appears above the message field. A conversation needs a person when your chat has no bot, or when the bot handed the conversation over to your team. The offer does not close the chat: the bot keeps answering what it knows, and the visitor can keep writing.

The chat knows your working hours only when it shows them: Admin > Inboxes, your chat inbox, tab Conversations, section Office hours, switch Show office hours in chat, with the schedule under Admin > Business hours and the default schedule under Admin > General, field Business hours. Without it there is no "outside working hours", and no offer.

In the AI chat without agents mode there are no working hours, and the same switch works when a visitor asks for a person. The bot answers as usual that only the AI assistant answers in this chat, and under that answer the line "Need a person? Leave a request and we will get back to you." appears with the same Leave a request button. The line goes away after the next answer of the bot. An ordinary question never brings it. See AI chat without agents.

A request from the chat window goes to the same requests inbox, with the same push notification and emails. Its first line is Request from the chat window instead of Request from the website, and the Page: line shows the page of your website where the chat was open. Each request is a new contact, separate from the visitor's chat conversation.

Changing a switch saves it into your chat inbox, which restarts it: a visitor who has the chat open at that moment sees it reconnect for a few seconds.

What appears in your panel

Turning it on adds two things to your panel:

• a web chat inbox for requests under Admin > Inboxes, named in the language of your panel (Requests in English). It has the look and language of your main web chat, a Pre-chat form with the fields Name, Phone and Email, and no AI assistant;
• a rule New request from the website → notify under Admin > Automations. It assigns each new request to the team your assistant hands conversations to, and notifies the team members. If there is no such team, it notifies the admins of your panel.

The bot does not answer requests. Your main web chat and its code on your website stay as they are.

What reaches you

• A New conversation push notification at once, with the request text, for agents who get push notifications: see Notifications and the EPAV mailbox.
• A notification in the panel and an email New request #N from the rule, with the request text, the visitor's name, phone and email, and an Open the conversation button. Like every notice from an automation rule, the email goes out at once, the same way as every other email to your agents.
• A New conversation email as well, only for agents who turned on emails about new conversations under Account > Notifications.
• The conversation itself: it starts with the line Request from the website, then the request text, and below it lines like Name: Anna, Phone: +372 5555 5555, Email: anna@example.com. When the form sits on your website as code, the last line is Page: https://yourcompany.com/contacts, the page where the visitor filled it in, without the part after ?; a direct link has no such line. Request from the website and Page are in the language of your platform, whatever language the visitor saw the form in. The contact is created with this name, phone and email.

Answer the visitor

Reply in the conversation in the panel as usual. The visitor has already left the form, so your reply goes to them by email from the email inbox of your platform within about five minutes: the panel looks for replies to visitors who are away every 5 minutes. Their answer to that email comes back to the same conversation. This works only when the visitor left an email; otherwise call them.

The reply email invites the visitor to answer by email only. It does not link to the chat on your website, because the request has no chat there.

Change the fields and the look

• Fields: Admin > Inboxes, the requests inbox, tab Pre-chat form. Rename, remove or add fields, including your own fields of type list, checkbox, date or number. The field How can we help? is always there. If you remove both the phone and the email, the form stops asking for them.
• Colors and font: tab Designer of the same inbox, as for the chat.

Changing the language of your platform in the cabinet renames the inbox, the form title, the default field names and the rule to the new language, unless you renamed them yourself.

Spam protection and the domain list

There is no captcha. The form is not sent sooner than 3 seconds after it opened, it has a hidden field that only robots fill in, and your platform accepts at most 100 requests a minute from one address. If spam still comes, write to support@epavdesk.com.

The Domain list of the inbox (see Live chat widget) does not apply to the form: the form talks to your platform from the EPAV Desk form page, not from your website, so it works on any website that carries its code.

Usage and limits

Requests use no cloud AI: the bot does not answer them, and the number of conversations never changes your price. Emails about requests and your email replies to visitors count towards the monthly limit of emails through our mail, like all emails from it; push notifications have no limit. See Notifications and the EPAV mailbox and Plans, limits and billing.

Turn it off

Press Turn off the form in the card. The requests inbox is turned off, the form on your website says "The form is not available right now", the card and the offer leave your chat window, and conversations stay in the panel. Turning it on again uses the same inbox and the same code.

Do not delete the requests inbox in the panel: the code on your website would stop working, and turning the form on again gives a new code.