Most forms on websites, are great at collecting data and notifying the business of a lead.
I.e a basic one way form:
The business process goes a little like this:
- Form completed
- Form data sent to business
- Business process the data
- Business sends relevant information to customer
- Client while waiting for you to respond, has gone to another competitor
How can you reduce this process to speed up the response to the client?
The best option is to supply the information, the potential client is looking for, instantly.
It has to be Instant, Informative and Smart (Able to carry out processes)
A general tendency with service companies in particular, is that each quote may be unique depending on the requirements of the client.
To overcome this difficulty, you need to see how the data is processed by the business. Can your service be compartmentalised and pricing assigned to a particular function or service.
Even though this may seem complex, breaking down your costs. Will not only allow you to see how much things are in detail, but you may be able to package your service better.
Adding this as available information for a client, should garner more custom, especially in a world of instant information gratification.
For example, as a web app development company, we don’t even know the price of a project, until it’s presented to us. But what we do know is how much standard things cost, even if it was many different possible combinations.
So we developed a PHP quotation calculator, that stored all the various possible combinations, and based on the user input, an estimated price was instantly displayed to the client.
From acquiring the lead, we would then refine the quote with the client. But since they had the information instantly, they were already in a position to take the next stage and go through with the project.
But our form was fairly simple, but did exactly the requirement we needed it for. Some of our clients have more complex requirements. A good example is Lingo Translation, a company that focuses on translating important documents all over the world.
We had the privilege of developing a fairly complex quotation form for them.
With prices needed to be set per word, per page, 50+ languages, document type. The price would change dynamically according to the user input. Giving an instant quote, instead of a normally fairly complex process that would take up to 1–3 hours or even overnight.
And after all that hard calculating, adding a simple payment system powered by paypal, the end-customer can order instantly too. So rather than looking at your inbox for quotes to process, you will be looking at orders that need completing.
With the smart form embedded in your website, the form process now goes a little like this:
- Form completed, client informed, client purchased
- Business carries out service
The form can then be adapted further, by creating a customer application that sits at the back-end, that allows you to share vital information to each client, kind of like online banking. Giving them a dedicated login with features that help the flow of your business. But that is another topic for another day.
Online Forms, do a lot more work that you think they can.
A website and application development company.