Form Products that Integrate with Salesforce
Whether you need a survey sent to your customer’s after the purchase of a product or an application completed on your website (both of which need to be tracked in your Salesforce instance), form products are the best tool to use. Here are some features you will probably want to consider as part of your form requirements:
Multiple Object Syncing
I think this is absolutely mandatory. Fields on a single form should always be able to map to different objects in Salesforce, including standard and custom. Period.
Pull and Push Data
A good form product can not only push fields completed on a form to Salesforce, but also gives the capability to pull data from Salesforce to the form created and disbursed. For example, let’s say you want to send a survey out to your contacts to gather demographic information. You may want to include from their Salesforce record their name, address, phone, email, etc…. These can be added as options that are fixed or can be updated. You will need to create a mapping of those fields to your form and include a unique identifier (typically the record ID). Then determine what fields are locked and what fields can be updated. Options for pushing data back to Salesforce typically are: updating records, upserting (update or create new), and creating new records. On a single form it’s possible to select more than one of these options on an object by object basis. So the Contact specific fields can update the Contact record but other demographic information may create a new record on a custom object related to that contact.
Syncing before Submitting
What if a multi-page, multi-step form is required, but, a lot of information may not be known at the onset to complete the form in it’s entirety. And, the initial fields completed are required to be added to Salesforce so that internal users can help and support with the completion of the remainder of the form? Is it possible to save and push before final submission? The answer is yes. Some products provide push options with a save button, some push when a next button is clicked. In either case, partial completed forms can be pushed to Salesforce in phases. Pretty cool!
Here are a few products I’m aware of that contain the features I’ve mentioned:
The difference between these would be in the details of other features not mentioned; price, preference on UI, etc. When you’re looking for a form product, first determine what your requirements are, request a demo on each product, compare pricing, and even download on a trial basis into a sandbox environment to test it out yourself.
Do you know of other form products that include these features and more you can recommend? Please feel free to comment below, on our Facebook page, or directly at me on Twitter @LeiferAshley or in the Success Community.
