How to Create a Web-to-Case Form in Salesforce: A Step-by-Step Guide

As a business that deals with customer support, managing inquiries – especially if cases come from multiple channels like emails, phone calls, and social media – can feel overwhelming. Offering multiple ways for customers to reach out is great, but the challenge isn’t just capturing these requests; it’s ensuring they’re tracked and resolved efficiently.

Web-to-Case is a useful tool that allows organizations to capture customer inquiries directly from their website and automatically create cases in Salesforce. Instead of adding to the chaos, it can help you manage your support process more effectively by having one centralized system to manage and respond to customer issues. After all, reducing manual effort minimizes the risk of missed requests.

In this guide, we’ll walk through the process of creating a Web-to-Case form, highlight its benefits, and share some best practices to get the most out of this feature. Let’s dive in!

What Is Web-to-Case?

Web-to-Case is an out-of-the-box feature in Salesforce that enables organizations to capture customer support inquiries directly from their website and automatically create cases in Salesforce. By generating and then embedding a simple HTML form on your website, customers can submit their issues or questions, and Salesforce will generate a case record for each submission.

This ensures that the information captured is exactly as the customer inputs it and helps support teams efficiently manage and respond to customer needs without the hassle of manually entering data. What’s a more surefire way of ensuring that every inquiry is properly logged and tracked?

Why Use Web-to-Case?

Web-to-Case will be beneficial for businesses that want to improve customer service efficiency. Since it automates the case creation process, it reduces manual effort and ensures that no customer request goes unnoticed. Web-to-Case will be particularly valuable for support-heavy businesses where handling a high volume of customer inquiries accurately and promptly is important.

Benefits of Using Web-to-Case

• Automated Case Creation: This makes the support process easier and more efficient by capturing cases directly from a website.
• Efficient Case Management: Cases are instantly recorded in Salesforce so that support teams can respond promptly.
• Customizable Forms: You can tailor the form fields to capture relevant information, improving data quality as well as customer experience.
• Automated Response: Send auto-reply emails to acknowledge receipt and provide reassurance to customers.

Prerequisites for Setting Up Web-to-Case

Before creating a Web-to-Case form, ensure you have the following:

• Admin Access
• Case Fields: List the Case fields that you’d like to include in your form.
• Email Templates: Prepare auto-response email templates for case acknowledgments.

• Public Site Access: The form needs to be hosted on a publicly accessible website.
• Case Queue: If you’d like the web-generated cases to be owned by a queue, make sure to create it first. If not, you can assign it to individual users.
• Case Assignment Rule: Decides how the web-generated cases are assigned to users or added to queues. If you don’t have an active assignment rule set up, all web-generated cases are assigned to the default case owner, which can be configured in Setup → Support Settings.

Creating the Web-to-Case Form

1. In Setup, search “Web-to-Case” in the quick find box. Select it to open the Web-to-Case settings.
2. Tick the box to enable Web-to-Case.

3. Also, tick the box for “Require reCAPTCHA Verification”. This is recommended to reduce spam, as requests that don’t pass verification will not generate cases.
4. For the Default Case Origin, select “Web” to signify that all cases generated from this form will be tagged as “Web” under the standard Case Origin field.
5. Hit “Save”! You’re halfway there – all we need to do now is generate the HTML to be used on your website.
6. In Setup, search for and select “Web-to-Case HTML Generator”.
7. Remember the list of Case fields you wanted to include in the form? It’s time to pick them out by adding them to the Selected column.

8. If your org has a self-service portal, select “Visible in Self-Service Portal” if you want web-generated cases to be visible to portal users. Otherwise, leave it unchecked.
9. For the URL, enter the complete URL of the webpage where you want your customers to be directed after submitting their information. The URL could lead to a ‘thank you’ or confirmation page, or simply your company’s homepage.
10. If you selected “Require ReCAPTCHA Verification” earlier in the Web-to-Case settings, complete the reCAPTCHA key pair. You will need two things for this: the Site Key and the Secret Key. The Site Key is used to render the reCAPTCHA challenge on your website or application, while the Secret Key is used by your server to verify the user’s response to the reCAPTCHA challenge. You can obtain a reCAPTCHA key pair by signing up for an account on the Google reCAPTCHA Admin Console along with instructions here. Skip this step if you did not select “Require reCAPTCHA Verification” in Web-to-Case settings.
11. Click “Generate”.
12. Your sample HTML should be ready now. Copy the whole text and paste it into where you’d like it to be displayed on your website.

13. For testing purposes, I pasted the text into the notepad and added the line <input type="hidden" name="debug" value="1"> just before </form>, then saved it as an .html file. This ensures that when you play around with the form during testing, it won’t create an actual case in Production. Here’s how it looks like when opening the file with a web browser:

14. Pretty simple, right? Obviously, you can tweak the HTML code a little bit to get some customizations in and have it fit the aesthetic of your website. But for testing, I’m keeping it as is. Now, fill out the fields.

15. Click “Submit”.
16. Debug should show you the right information according to your org and the details you enter into the form.

17. If you’d like to see the form in action, remove the testing line <input type="hidden" name="debug" value="1"> from your HTML code and save the file again. Then, open it with your browser and fill out the fields again. Make sure to indicate that this is a test case so your agents don’t mistakenly handle it!

18. Click “Submit”. You should be redirected to the URL we set up under Web-to-Case settings.
19. Check your org’s cases. If you sort from latest to oldest, the created case should be first on the list.

20. Open it and verify if the fields have been populated accurately. You should see that the auto-response email has been sent to the customer as well.

Considerations for Web-to-Case

Web-to-Case is awesome, and you can put in pretty much any Case field you’d like, except for rich text area fields. If you still decide to put them in, keep in mind that any information entered will show up as plain text when the case is created. Also, Web-to-Case forms don’t support attachments. Salesforce did state that this feature is on their roadmap, but it requires a large engineering effort, so we haven’t had an update since. You can upvote the idea here or consider some workarounds.

When you enable Web-to-Case, spam will most likely be an enemy. reCAPTCHA is your first line of defense, so if you haven’t used it with Web-to-Case yet, consider doing so!

Salesforce can capture up to 5,000 cases within a 24-hour period. When that 24-hour limit is reached, and more than 5,000 cases are submitted within that time frame, the excess requests are stored in a pending request queue that contains both Web-to-Case and Web-to-Lead requests. Those requests are submitted when the limit refreshes.

Summary

Web-to-Case is a valuable feature that fortunately comes out of the box with Salesforce. It allows businesses to efficiently manage customer inquiries from their website by automatically capturing and creating cases, minimizing manual effort, and ensuring that no customer request slips through the cracks.

Setting up a Web-to-Case form may involve a few steps, but once in place, it becomes a reliable way to enhance customer support and keep track of incoming issues through your site. Customers are also given assurance with the auto-response email that’s set up along with this feature.

Have you set up Web-to-Case in your org yet? How did you customize it? Leave your answers in the comments below!