How do I send a customer a form to fill in?

A customer form is a set of questions you send to someone who is already your customer, such as a tax organizer or a move-in checklist. They fill it in from a secure link, and their answers are saved on their record. Customer forms are on the Pro plan and up.

Build the form once

1. Open Lead forms, then click Add a form.
2. Choose "For your existing customers", name the form and click Create form. It opens empty, because their name, email and phone are already on their record.
3. Add your questions. A customer form cannot ask for a name, email or phone, so a form can never change how you reach someone.
4. Switch the form on. It needs at least one question first.

A customer form never appears on your website, and nobody can fill it in without a link you sent.

Send it from a task

1. In your workspace, with a task open, find the "Ask the customer for" box in the Task Controls column.
2. Click Form, pick the form and click Send form.

Your customer gets an email with a secure link to their progress page, or a text when there is no email on file. If they already have this form waiting, sending it again sends a fresh link to the same form rather than a second copy. If nothing could be sent, you see why, such as "No email or mobile on file" or "They have asked not to be contacted", and nothing is left waiting on their page.

Send it from a journey job

You can have a job in your journey send the form for you when a customer reaches it.

1. Open the customer form in Lead forms.
2. Under "Form for this job:", pick the job. Choose No job to unlink it.

The list shows your team's jobs that do not already do something else with the AI. A job that already sends a message, writes work for your team, or asks for documents, a signature or a payment cannot also send a form; you see "That job already does something else."

When a customer reaches the job, the form waits for a person on your team to approve it. Approving sends it, exactly as sending it from a task does. A person approves each one until the AI has earned the right to send on its own. To stop the job sending the form, pick "No job" here, or set the job's "Who does it" to a person in your journey editor.

The job stays open while you wait. When the customer sends their answers, the job ticks itself off with the note "Form received", and their journey moves on just as it does when you finish a job yourself. If the form was sent from a task whose job is not linked to that form, the task is left for you to finish.

If the form is unlinked or deleted after a customer reached the job, approving it says "No customer form is linked to this job. Link one in Settings, Lead forms." and nothing is sent.

Pick the form on the journey job

You can also choose the form from the job itself, in your journey editor.

1. Open TMS, then Setup, then the Journey tab, and click "Edit journey".
2. Open the job. Set "Who does this" to "AI drafts, person checks" or "AI does it".
3. Under "What the AI does", pick "Send the customer form:" followed by the form's name. Click Publish.

Only your active customer forms are listed, never a website form, and a business with no customer form sees no form option. A form is sent from one job: picking it on two jobs in the same journey asks you to pick it on one, and picking a form that a job in another journey already sends moves it to this job and gives the other job back to a person. Only an ordinary job can send a form, not one that asks the customer for documents, a payment or a signature. A person still approves each send, as when you link the form from Lead forms.

To stop the job sending the form, pick another action or set "Who does this" to Person, then publish. The form itself is kept.

When the AI wants to send a form in a chat

When the AI wants to send a form during a chat, you get a task called "Approve: Send the customer one of your customer forms". Open it and press Approve to send the form, Turn down if it should not go, or Done it by hand if you already sent it yourself.

What your customer sees

The form is the first thing under "What we still need from you" on their progress page, with a Fill in button. It opens the form on its own page, where they answer and click Send my answers. Once it is sent, it leaves their page. Switching a form off, or deleting it, takes it off every customer's page.

Where the answers land

Every answer is kept with the form's submissions. Each answer is also saved to the customer's custom fields:

• To the field you chose under "Save the answer to" for that question, when your business has custom fields.
• Otherwise to the custom field whose name matches the question, ignoring capitals.
• Otherwise to a new field named after the question. Two questions with the same name are saved as, for example, Notes and Notes_2.

A customer can hold up to 50 custom fields. If a form would go past that, the answers that do not fit stay with the submission, and a note on the customer's record names them.