Form Advocates
Ben Thompson
Senior Management of Enterprise Development Team
Bobby McDaniel
Director, Marketing Technology & Analytics
Setting the Stage
What services does Promontory Network provide?
Promontory Interfinancial Network provides tools that enable financial institutions to offer access to multimillion-dollar FDIC insurance, manage liquidity, grow loans, and manage asset concentrations. In doing so, the company helps banks to manage their balance sheets in ways that promote industry stability at local, state, and national levels and that help fund greater economic growth in communities throughout the U.S., including in the most underserved locales.
What is the role of the Enterprise Development Team?
The Development team maintains and enhances the software that employees use, including the company’s intranet and CRM tool, Salesforce. The Development team found FormAssembly as a potential solution to previous pain points.
What was Promontory Interfinancial Network’s initial FormAssembly use case?
The initial use case for FormAssembly centered around the onboarding process for new bank customers. Previously, banks filled out a 14-15 page hard-copy document. Because Promontory Network used other Salesforce services, the Development team wanted to use Salesforce’s CRM platform to make the onboarding process more efficient.
The Development team became intrigued by the ability to embed forms on a key web page and to send real-time data to Salesforce using custom objects. The team liked the Salesforce out-of-the-box Salesforce solution, but wanted additional features, and FormAssembly fit their needs.
“[FormAssembly] saved us from having to build all this from scratch. It was a classic case of not reinventing the wheel,” Thompson said.
The form created with FormAssembly is now the collection point for the entire onboarding process, and it enables staff to perform key actions with new data. Promontory Network staff can efficiently convert submitted contact information into actual Salesforce contacts and vet the information banks enter into the form against information provided by the FDIC. FormAssembly has helped Promontory Network create a more secure, efficient process.
Does Promontory Network implement FormAssembly in any other ways?
Promontory Network staff also use FormAssembly on the corporate website for registration, download, and collection forms.
With the ease of access and branded appearance that FormAssembly brings, staff were able to increase their use of website forms from just one or two to multiple forms.
“With how good FormAssembly looks out of the box, we were able to go web form crazy,” McDaniel said.
What pain points did FormAssembly
help solve?
McDaniel reported that on the marketing side of operations, FormAssembly’s ease of use is beyond what most applications offer. Forms can be created in less than 10 minutes, and embedding them on the company website is hassle-free. FormAssembly also offers integrations that make it simple to connect forms to Salesforce and Pardot. These integrations wouldn’t be possible when using paper processes.
Are there any future projects in the works?
There is currently a FormAssembly initiative with the sales team to consider the use of web forms to increase the lead collection process. Sales staff would be able to collect business cards at events and input the contact information into a form, which would then send the data to a lead source campaign. This project would allow more thorough lead collection from events.
What ‘unlimited’ aspects of FormAssembly help the Promontory Network team excel?
One of the things staff most enjoy about FormAssembly is the ability to pass the return action, or overall event that a user wants to see occur post-submission, dynamically. This ability promotes results with less effort up front.
For example, the team at Promontory Network can have 5 different forms on the main website that reference the same FormAssembly form on the backend. These forms appear to behave in different ways because of hidden fields. From a strategic perspective, Thompson reports that staff can streamline the process of having separate forms submitted to the same ending location.
“This ability helps us maintain only one form on the backend, and it means less maintenance on our part,” Thompson said.
These post-submission actions can occur in an unlimited number of form scenarios. Once the initial setup is established, this means that the team can collect a limitless number of unique responses.
“
[FormAssembly] saved us from having to build all this from scratch. It was a classic case of not reinventing the wheel.”
Unlimited Potential
On the marketing side alone, there are already 30-40 forms used. The Promontory Network team is hopeful that new use cases for web forms continue to expand as more projects and needs arise.
FormAssembly’s powerful integrations, such as with Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, alleviate extra hassle and provide unlimited options for new projects. The ability to clone and archive forms also saves time during the creation and implementation processes.
“If anyone asks, there’s a form for that. It’s so easy and simple. In the past, I’d try to limit how many forms I used because it was a chore to update them,” McDaniel reported.
When it comes to initiatives such as customer surveys, the ability to collect an unlimited number of responses is incredibly useful. Since there are no caps on the amount of data that can be collected, team members can use website survey forms to continually drive new information and responses.
Want to learn more about secure forms for financial institutions?
Our free 100 Ways to Use FormAssembly eBook is a great place to start for inspiration!
