In-App Contact Forms

The in-app experience

The team behind Formimp is about to launch a Windows application called Siteimp . Siteimp is a full website scanner that returns a comprehensive report on the health and structure of your entire website. Tech support is a really important part of the customer experience and we needed a good way for users to submit support requests without leaving the app.

But we had another strategic reason to extend Formimp into the desktop world. Siteimp is a new product and will be part of a greater suite of tools, so providing good support and starting product conversations around those support requests is a great way to get it right... the fifteenth time. :)

Formimp was perfect because when users have problems, we get it in Slack. We can reach out to the customer via email and dissect what we did wrong. In a new product, every tech support request means one of three things:

• Your code sucks.
• Your documentation sucks.
• Your marketing is misleading (and so it sucks).

Through reaching out, solving the problem and using some of that famed software developer charm and charisma, we can turn each support request into an opportunity to improve our product. Formimp is really good at making that possible.

Really overthinking this

Formimp is an API. It runs on the web. The easiest implementation would have been to just build a contact form in the app, point it to the API and call it a day. But oh no. When it comes to customers, anything worth thinking about is worth overthinking about. So, we thought about the reality of both Siteimp and our customers. Siteimp itself is a bunch of web bots that run payloads, so it can already send stuff and deal with responses. With what we already had, extending it to do what Formimp does, but within the backend of the application on the user machine was a really simple leap.

So when our users contact us, they don't have to go through another API or rely on Formimp's privacy policy. Everything is on their Windows machine and it all happens there. Heck, they can even use the same tech support tool we use .

Dragons ahead

It sounds great and we're very excited to roll it out. But it occurs to us that maybe there's a reason that nobody does tech support quite like this. Our biggest fear right now is being flooded to such an extent that Slack becomes useless as a communications channel. Which would be a useful signal that our product has a problem, but would make fixing it practically impossible to coordinate.

And so, it's an experiment, but one we can manage for launch. If this page suddenly disappears, it was likely one of those really traumatic mucked up fesses in software development and we likely don't want to talk about it. You've been warned.