Intake Form
Also known as: Client intake form, Onboarding questionnaire, Request form
An intake form is a structured questionnaire that collects the information your team needs from a client before kicking off work or a support request.
Definition
An intake form is the structured questionnaire a client fills out before your team starts work, opens a ticket, or onboards them onto a project. It captures the baseline details—contact info, scope, goals, assets, access credentials, deadlines—that your operators would otherwise have to chase down over email.
In practice, intake forms live inside a client portal, support desk, or project management tool and route submissions to the right owner automatically. Fields are often conditional, so a client filling out a 'new design request' sees different questions than one submitting a 'billing dispute,' and the response triggers a workflow on your side.
Intake forms differ from generic contact forms in that they are scoped to a specific service line and feed downstream processes. A contact form ends at 'we'll get back to you'; an intake form ends with a populated project record, a ticket, or a kickoff brief your team can act on the same day.
Why It Matters
Every minute your account managers spend asking clients for their logo files, brand colors, or admin logins is a minute not spent on the actual deliverable. A well-designed intake form front-loads that data collection so projects start with everything in hand, which compresses cycle time and reduces the back-and-forth that erodes client trust.
Skip the intake step and you end up with half-briefed projects, scope creep, and support tickets that ping-pong between your team and the client for days. Worse, inconsistent information across clients makes it impossible to standardize delivery, train new hires, or hand off accounts cleanly when someone leaves.
Examples in Practice
A 40-person creative agency uses a branded intake form when onboarding new retainer clients. The form gathers brand guidelines, social handles, approval contacts, and preferred turnaround times—then auto-creates a project workspace with all of those details pre-filled, so the kickoff call focuses on strategy instead of logistics.
A B2B SaaS support team uses tiered intake forms based on issue type. Billing questions route to finance with invoice numbers attached, technical bugs route to engineering with browser and account metadata captured automatically, and feature requests feed into a product backlog—all from one client-facing entry point.
A boutique law firm requires every new matter to start with an intake form covering conflict-check details, opposing parties, jurisdiction, and document uploads. The submission triggers a conflict review before any attorney time is logged, protecting the firm from accidental representation issues.