Web-to-Case in Salesforce

  • April 14, 2022

Salesforce Web-to-Case is an innovative feature that helps you gather customer support requests directly from your company’s website and automatically generate up to 5,000 new cases a day. This capability can help your organization respond to customers faster, improving your support team’s productivity.

Web-to-Case generates a snippet of HTML that you can use to create a simple public case submission page on your website with your branding and styling. Users can categorize specific requests, assuming the customer fills out the relevant information. For example, the form may include contact name, email, phone, subject or description. This method of data collection in Web-to-Case helps in email categorizing within Salesforce. The HTML form you create in Web-to-Case can be published quickly on your website.

In Salesforce, Web-to-Case form fields like name and email should always be set explicitly. It also asks for the return URL, where the page will be redirected when the case is submitted through the web form.

The values entered through the web are stored in the newly created Case in the Web Name and Web Email fields. If that email address is associated with a contact in your system, then it will automatically associate that case with the contact who has that email address — and with the account associated with that contact.

If that email address isn’t found, or more than one contact with that email address is discovered, then it won’t know which contact to associate to the case. In that instance, it will leave the Contact and Account fields on the case blank and allow you to fill them in manually (which you can generally find using those Web Name and Web Email fields). It’s limited to receiving 5,000 cases per day.

Salesforce runs field validation rules before creating records submitted via Web-to-Case and only creates records that have valid values.

Enable Web-to-Case

  1. Go to Set up.
  2. Search for Web-to-Case.
  3. The following options will appear in the Web-to-Case settings:
    1. Enable Web-to-Case — checkbox.
    2. Require ReCAPTCHA verification — checkbox. The reCAPTCHA widget requires customers to select an “I’m not a robot” checkbox before they can create a case. When this option is selected, requests without reCAPTCHA verification don’t generate cases. After enabling, confirm that your generated HTML includes the reCAPTCHA information.
    3. Default Case origin.
    4. Default Response template. If you have an auto-response rule for case, the email template from the auto-response rule will trigger. If the case record doesn’t meet any entry rule of the auto-response rule within that case, the Default Response template will be sent.
    5. Hide Record Information. If case creation fails, select “hide record information” in the email sent to customers.
    6. Email Signature. Customize the signature in the notification email sent when online case creation fails. If you don’t provide one, the default email signature will be used.

Generate web-to-case form

  1. Search Web-to-Case in Quick Find in Setup.
  2. Click Web-to-Case HTML Generator.
  3. Select the fields you want to be available on the Web-to-Case form and enter a return address where the user will be redirected after submitting the form.
  4. Click Generate; you’ll get an HTML code snippet by Salesforce.
  5. Copy the Form TAG from the HTML code and deploy it to your website.

NOTE: The HTML code generated by Salesforce does not include styling. (This can be done by a web developer before deploying the code to the website.)

— By Rishabh Dubey