FormAssembly’s Stay-in-Touch Alternative: Using FormAssembly’s Prefilling Capabilities With Your Clients

It’s important for consulting and service-based companies to have a client-first mindset. What does that mean? In addition to providing quick assistance and working hand-in-hand with clients to help them achieve their organizational goals, it means finding every little way you can to make your professional relationships smoother.
How can FormAssembly help you provide better service to your clients? We have lots of examples of FormAssembly use cases on our blog, but today we’re talking specifically about our alternative to Salesforce Stay-in-Touch, which is being retired in Summer of 2017. We’ve covered in past articles how FormAssembly’s Stay-in-Touch alternative lets you accomplish more than you could with Salesforce Stay-in-Touch, and now we’ll go over a few ways you can use the prefilling capabilities of FormAssembly’s Stay-in-Touch alternative to make life easier for your clients.

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 If you’re between projects with a client, you might not know immediately if their information has changed — and outdated contact information can result in hassles for everyone involved.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 FormAssembly Salesforce Prefill Connector, paired with your Salesforce emailing preference such as templates or 1:1 emails, offer a much better user experience for correcting, updating, and verifying client information.
FormAssembly’s Stay-in-Touch alternative allows you to prefill so much more than just basic items like name, email, and phone number, including objects relative to the Contact or Lead record. You can also map in 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 prefilling contact information such as Account ID, then mapping off that and populating company information and contact information on your next engagement.
• Prefill invoice and billing information from Account/Contact records into a form with Stripe, PayPal, or another payment processor in order to accept payments.
• Prefill from junction objects, which can contain many prefillable and mappable record IDs, both custom and standard.

You can create forms to update individual contacts’ 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.
Here’s a quick overview of how the information update process works with FormAssembly forms:

1. You send an email to your clients with a link that directs them to a form to update their information.
2. One of your contacts receives that email and clicks through to the form.
3. Your contact opens the form, which pulls the client’s information from Salesforce. The form is prefilled with just about any information you want.
4. Your client makes any needed changes to the form and clicks the submit button.
5. The information is immediately funneled into Salesforce and your contact is updated with the correct information.

And that’s just the beginning of what the Salesforce Prefill Connector can do to help move your business forward.

Speed Up Client 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 really get to work with them.
To help you and your clients keep track of what’s been done and what items you still need, it’s possible to create checklists for your clients that you can prefill as items get completed. This works well for consulting agencies that manage onboarding data in 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.

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 FormAssembly 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.
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If you can store a piece of information in Salesforce, you can prefill that information into an online form. With FormAssembly, you can easily request quick updates from your clients without a long email chain, and you’re not limited to restrictive forms that only allow certain pieces of information.
Learn more about using the Salesforce Prefill Connector here, and contact our support team for information about using FormAssembly as your Stay-in-Touch alternative.