Bypass contact form self-serve

Our full contact form template directs your readers to a self-serve search like this:

Sample Contact Form self-serve prompt

Readers can search the topic they want help with, and the form will return a list of possible resources.

Sample Contact Form self-serve search results

Only once a reader clicks "No, submit my request." can they get to the actual contact form.

This is great for knowledge bases that provide support and you're trying to encourage self-service before ticket creation.

But in some knowledge bases, it makes more sense to have the Contact Us link take you straight to the contact form itself, bypassing the self-service piece entirely.

If you skip the self-service questions, the Contact Form Reporting will capture these hits, but they won't appear in the Search Phrase list, since we can't detect deflection if there is no point for deflection.

If you'd like to make that change:

  1. Go to Settings > Style.
  2. Below the preview pane, click on Custom HTML.
  3. Select Top Navigation from the Custom HTML dropdown.
  4. Look for the navbar-collapse div that contains your navbar-right, and within that, look for the contact template:
  5. Copy the code below and paste it to replace the template("contact") merge code:
    <a class="hg-header-link" href="/help/contact-feedback">Contact Us</a>

    Your knowledge base might use the /home/ or /docs/ root path instead of /help/. If it does, replace /help/ in the href to match what your knowledge base uses.

  6. You can also adjust the text to say something besides "Contact Us", if you'd like.
  7. With the change in place, click Save.

Here's a sample with this change made, using the /help/ root path:

Sample with /help/ root path and Contact Us as text