A Contact Form That Asks for Too Much

Eleven boxes and a button

Count the boxes on the contact page of a typical small business website. Name, email, phone, street address, city, postal code, service, budget, preferred date, how you heard about us, and finally the message.

Each box was added for a reason. Somebody wanted to know where enquiries came from, or to stop answering people outside the service area, or to screen out small jobs.

Nobody added them up. To a visitor on a phone, the page now reads as a questionnaire standing between them and one simple question.

And every answer that does arrive is personal information the business now holds and has to keep safe.

Why each field costs enquiries

A first enquiry is a small, tentative thing. The visitor wants to know whether you do the job, roughly when, and perhaps roughly what it costs.

Every field adds effort to asking. On a phone, each one means a tap, a keyboard sliding up, and often a scroll to find the next box.

Fields the visitor cannot answer cost the most. Somebody with no idea what a new roof should cost will stall at a box asking for their budget.

Nobody at the business sees this happen. Abandoned forms leave no trace in the inbox, so a long form looks as though it works: the enquiries that do arrive are complete.

The fields that cause the trouble

• Street address, asked before anyone has agreed to visit.
• Budget, from people asking precisely because they do not know.
• How did you hear about us, a question for your records, not their need.
• A required phone number, from people who chose a form to avoid a call.
• Company name, on a form mostly used by households.
• A dropdown of services written in the trade's own terms.

The fourth is the one that backfires most visibly. People who prefer email either leave or type a string of zeros to get past the box, and a form full of invented numbers tells you nothing.

What the minimum form asks

For a first enquiry, three things are enough: a name, one way to reply, and a box for the message.

Ask for an email address and offer the phone number as optional, with a line saying you will happily call if they would rather talk.

If the business serves a defined area, one more field earns its place: the town or neighbourhood, not the street. It answers your real question, whether the job is in range, without asking where somebody lives.

Label the message box with a prompt that helps, such as what needs doing and roughly when, rather than a bare word like comments.

Marking the other fields optional helps less than it seems, since many people fill in every box they are shown and you still end up holding the answers.

Where the other questions belong

The removed questions do not disappear. They move to the point where the visitor has a reason to answer them.

Budget belongs in the first conversation, once you have explained what the job usually involves and what drives the price. Asked there, it is a discussion rather than a test.

The street address belongs in the booking, when somebody is actually coming to look, and so does the preferred date.

How did you hear about us is better asked out loud. Your analytics already records which site or search sent each visitor, without anybody filling in a box.

Every answer is something to protect

Every field also creates a record. Each submission lands in at least one inbox, often several, and many form plugins keep a copy in the site's database as well.

Canadian privacy law, federal and provincial, expects a business to collect only the personal information it needs for a purpose it can explain. A home address from somebody who never became a customer is hard to justify.

Less collected also means less to lose. A form that never asked for street addresses cannot leak them, and an incident involving names and email addresses is smaller than one involving where people live.

A worked example

A residential roofing company had a quote form with fourteen fields, among them full address, roof age, square footage, pitch, a budget range and how the customer had heard of them.

The owner tried it on his phone one evening. It took several minutes, and he knew the answers; most homeowners would have no idea of their roof's pitch or square footage.

The enquiries that did arrive showed it. Square footage was usually a guess, the budget box often said not sure, and a fair number of phone numbers were plainly invented.

The estimator measured every roof on the first visit anyway, so most of those answers were never used.

The form now asks for a name, an email address, an optional phone number, the town, and what is happening with the roof. Everything else waits for the call or the visit.

The business also stopped holding the home addresses of people who never became customers, which nobody had considered before.

Making it easy on a phone

Set the email and phone boxes up as email and phone fields, so phones show the right keyboard: the one with the @ sign, or the number pad.

Accept phone numbers however people type them, with spaces, brackets or dashes. A form that rejects a correct number over its formatting loses the enquiry at the last step.

And when something is wrong, say which field and why, and keep everything else they typed. A form that empties itself after an error is rarely filled in twice.

The counter-case

Some forms should be longer.

Where a price cannot be given without certain details, such as a mover needing both addresses and a date, those fields earn their place, provided each one says why it is there.

A business with more enquiries than it can handle may deliberately want a little friction to filter out casual requests. That is a legitimate choice, as long as it is made knowingly.

For a first enquiry, though: a name, a way to reply and a message, with everything else saved for the conversation.

The form, rebuilt

1. Fill in your own form on a phone.
2. List every field and what it is used for.
3. Remove anything nobody has acted on this year.
4. Make the phone number optional.
5. Ask for the town, not the street.
6. Move budget and source questions to the conversation.
7. Keep what visitors typed when a field has an error.

Step one settles the argument. Owners rarely see their own form the way customers do, and five minutes on a phone usually shows which fields have to go.

What to do when information you collected goes astray is covered in the breach log federal privacy law now requires.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.