Guest blog post — From time to time we have our customers and vendors write guest blog posts around topics we think can be helpful to you. One of our favorite and most used, web based tools is an online form builder called Formstack. In this post, the team at Formstack share how you can improve internal communications with online forms.
Recently, the Formstack team went to a local retreat center for a day of challenge leadership and bonding. Prior to the trip, we were asked to send the venue a list of what every team member wanted for lunch that day. Our office manager quickly puts together a lunch order form using our product and sent it out to everyone on our team. After we submitted our requests, she exported it into an Excel doc and emailed it to the retreat coordinators. Everyone’s lunch arrived correctly, and the retreat staff kept commenting on how ingenious and organized our lunch order was. What took our office manager a few minutes ultimately led to a simplified ordering experience for the retreat. While this example may not apply to your company, there are a variety of ways to enhance internal communication within your company or department using online forms. Here are a few features within Formstack that can lead to more structure and efficiency at your company:
1.Shareable data and dynamic reporting
With Formstack, you can collect all sorts of vital customer information, from email addresses to survey feedback – but what’s the point of having all that data if you can’t share it with your colleagues? Formstack allows you to share customer data without giving away your account information. Using a custom URL, you can share your data with anyone who has that private link. Additionally, you can control how much data you want to share, allowing you to respect your customer’s privacy while still getting feedback from collaborators.
2. Notification and confirmation emails
When collecting information from customers, users, partners, etc., not everyone needs to see all the information gathered. With
notification emails, you can customize who receives information about certain submissions. This is nice because you can maintain control of your Formstack account, but selected coworkers can still have customer information delivered right to their inboxes.
When using confirmation emails, you can automatically send a message to the person who filled out your form, confirming all the details they submitted. If you have coworkers or team members who have filled out an HR form or appointment request, you can remind them of when their appointment is and what information they provided. It’s an easy way to nudge without bombarding them. You can also set up a confirmation page with the same information or redirect users to a third-party page (such as your website or an event page) upon submission.
3. Third-party Integrations
Nothing is more annoying than repeating communicated information. If you don’t like to repeat yourself in conversations or directions, don’t do it with your data. With Formstack’s
network of integrations, you can collect data and automatically send it to a third-party
payment processor, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool, or another database.
When collaborating on a project, it’s important that everyone has equal input or involvement. Using an online form integrated with your favorite web app, projects become even more streamlined. Trying to gather emails for a contest? Integrate your form with an email marketing client, and ask your coworkers to share the form using its unique URL. All submitted emails will go directly into your designated list. Collecting phone numbers for your sales team? With Formstack, you can set up your CRM tool to pull phone numbers from lead forms, putting them right in front of the necessary department.
4. Mobile Apps
Are you the kind of person that loves to have information in the palm of your hand? Formstack offers a
mobile app for Windows, iPhone, iPad and Android mobile devices so that you can quickly gather information around top performing forms, see the number of daily submissions and views, individual submission data, and much more. Avoid being stuck in a meeting without the pertinent customer information you need. You can even use our app to quickly generate charts from submitted data, in case you need to reinforce your information with pretty lines and colors.
These are just a few common features our customers have used to streamline internal communication, but users have manipulated our forms to suit a variety of company needs. Do you use Formstack for internal communication? Is there a unique function you’ve discovered?
This post came from a collaboration of multiple team members at Formstack. Formstack provides its users with an easy-to-use online form building solution that quickly creates a gateway for online data collection.
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