Stay in touch: 6 ideas for using prefilled forms for your business
Today's guest post comes from Maggie Tharp, Content Marketing Specialist at FormAssembly.
If you use Salesforce, you’re probably aware that the Stay-in-Touch Request feature was recently retired. The main use for this feature was to send an automated email letting someone know you were updating their information. A link in the email would direct the person to a prefilled form with the contact information you currently had for them. They could update any changes in their information by submitting the form.
Even though Salesforce retired the feature, it’s still possible to accomplish the same outcome with FormAssembly’s forms and Salesforce Connectors.
A key part of the FormAssembly solution is the Prefill Connector, which prefills information into forms that can then be sent to your contacts. Here are a few ways you can use the prefilling capabilities of FormAssembly’s Stay-in-Touch alternative to make life easier in your business.
1. Prefill Forms to Update Client Contact Information
The most straightforward example of how to use FormAssembly’s Stay-in-Touch alternative is for updating your clients’ contact information. If you’re between projects with a client, you might not know immediately if their information has changed — and outdated contact information can result in hassles for everyone involved.
The Stay-in-Touch alternative allows you to prefill so much more than just basic items like name, email, and phone number. You can also map in objects relative to the Contact or Lead record and custom fields for information you may have that isn’t standard.
Here are a few examples of how companies can use prefilling:
- Prefill recent order information from an Opportunity that the client was listed as a Contact role on.
- Prefill Account record information by using a client’s Account ID to locate and populate company and contact information into a form.
- Prefill from junction objects, which can contain many prefillable and mappable record IDs, both custom and standard.
You can create forms to update individual contact’s information or to update contact information for the organization as a whole, in case one of your clients relocates their office, changes their phone number, or makes some other change that you need to track.
2. Speed Up Onboarding
When you’re just starting to work with a new client, there are undoubtedly a lot of documents that you need to collect and steps you need to take before you can get to work.
To help you and your clients keep track of what’s been done and what items you still need to accomplish, it’s possible to create checklists for your clients that you can prefill as items are completed. This works especially well for companies that manage onboarding data in Salesforce with Salesforce for Human Resources.
Instead of fielding multiple questions from clients about what’s left in the onboarding process, a checklist that answers those questions quickly is a much better solution.
3. Prefilling Payment Forms
It’s kind of a pain to have to re-enter the same information in a form on regular basis. If you use forms for product order forms or payable invoices, you have the option of prefilling contact information and other fields when sending one of these forms to your clients.
This allows them to skip the step of entering information you already have and also gives them an opportunity to make edits to the information stored in your Salesforce account in case anything has recently changed.
4. Engage With Customers Early on in the Relationship
It happened! Your marketing and sales efforts paid off and you gained a new customer. In Salesforce, that means you’ll be converting leads into accounts, contacts and, prior to conversion, opportunities. Once you’ve changed the status of your leads, it’s important to stay in contact with them.
Sending prefilled forms to customers early in the relationship with the information you already have on a prospect cuts down on the work they have to do. It also keeps your Salesforce records clean and allows you to build on your existing records.
Whether it’s to follow up on a recent purchase, or walk new clients through your onboarding process, a prefilled form can help you provide your customers with a personalized, simple experience and allow you to gather any contact information changes along the way.
5. Send Surveys to Your Contacts to Enrich the Relationship
No business is perfect, and one of the best ways to improve is to get real-life feedback directly from your customers or partners. These stakeholders likely have plenty of opinions and thoughts on how you could make your services and products more attractive, and asking them shows them how important they are to your business.
Maybe you’re thinking that your response will be marginal. But you can increase the chances that people will fill out your surveys if you create forms that are easy to fill out. Prefilling information for your contacts is just one way to speed up the process.
Here’s an example from FormAssembly’s own sales using prefilling and the Salesforce connector to send prefilled survey forms to partners to gather their insights on FormAssembly and offer the ability to update information at the same time.
The form above pulls in information from both the contact and the account associated with it, and sends survey responses to a custom survey object in Salesforce. This form also prefills some hidden fields like contact and account ID to ensure record accuracy when the recipients’ submission is passed through the Salesforce Submit Connector.
Here’s a deeper dive into how the connectors were set up to make this survey happen.
1. The setup uses the Salesforce Submit and Prefill Connectors.
2. The viewer would access the form through a personalized email with a link to the prefilled form.
3. The Prefill Connector prefills both contact and account information.
4. The Submit Connector updates contact and account information and sends survey responses to a custom object in Salesforce.
6. Follow-Up With Customers Post-Cancellation
Losing business can feel like suffering a crushing defeat, especially if the cancellation came out of nowhere. But customers cancel for a variety of different reasons. Depending on their rationale, you can learn from the loss of a customer and make changes to your business or readjust your strategy to avoid losing more customers for the same reason.
You can learn why your customers cancel with a well-timed post-cancellation survey prefilled with the information you have on them and including questions about why they left.
The power of FormAssembly’s Salesforce Prefill Connector makes it a solid solution to replace Salesforce Stay-in-Touch Request functionality. You can learn more about how to build contact update forms using the Salesforce Prefill and Submit Connectors in FormAssembly’s Stay-in-Touch eBook.
If you’re looking for more ways to customize your use of Salesforce and connected apps, we’ve can help.
