What is the best way to allow customers to create cards?

[Nick Parkin]

I want customers to be able to create a fault report for our maintenance support board. I created an email address which creates a card on the right list on the right board, and it works fine when I or my maintenance manager test it. Having published the link to our customers with the intention that instead of mailing us they emailed their fault to the Trello board. So far only one person has done this successfully (it worked magnificently, and they even included a photo of the problem on the card!), the others are saying that the mail won't send.

Most of my customers are not techie, and the eMail address is very long and complex. I suspect that the process maybe too complex for someone who doesn't know, and doesn't care about what they are doing.

Can anyone suggest a simpler, foolproof, way of allowing the public to create cards on a list?

[Matthew N]

Hey Nick

If the email-to-board works for one person, it should work for everyone. It could be that they're not copying the entire email address to send? Are they getting any bounce back email from the attempt?  Very strange, for sure.

How about Google Forms  + Zapier?  Set up a zap to create a card from a Google Form submission..  There's also a zap that you can use to customize the email address.

[Nick Parkin]

Thanks for the speedy response. One of the problems I'm having in sorting this out is that I don't actually see what fails for them. The one stunning success originally failed, and I sent the link and a vCard again. When I asked which method they used to succeed I got no reply.

I'll look into Zapier, although I use IFTTT instead of Zapier so I'll check that first. Thanks for the idea.

[Nick Parkin]

Matthew,

Thanks I think that you may have given me a neat solution. I've never seen Google Forms before, but I've just cobbled together something that worked. I don't really know what I'm doing, especially since I don't use Google Docs, but I managed to put together a Google Form which then emails the answer to my Trello list. I didn't need Zapier, Google does it on it's own.

It's actually really clever and I can see that it could be much more powerful than my simple use because the forms allow you to send your eMails to different addresses depending upon the answers that you get on the form, so you could set it up generate cards and post them into a choice of different lists and boards.