Use Cases and Examples

The “Enhanced Customer Forms” feature in Pakk means you can effectively eliminate the need for paper forms in your business.

In this article, we outline a number of common use cases for forms in physical-product businesses and you would go about implementing them in Pakk.

• Simple “contact us”

• Landing Pages

• Trade customer registration

• Newsletter signup

• Product registration

• Explicit agreement to terms

• Credit application

• Request for consultation

Contact Us

The simplest of all forms - name, email and a comments box. Legalities, like agreement to Privacy Policy and optional subscription settings are taken care of for you (remember to set up your preference for whether explicit consent to Privacy Policy is required on forms in general, in Website config).

You could link to this form from anywhere in your site, and/or select it as the main contact form to be displayed on your autogenerated “Contact Us” page.*

The “Form Submission” record will clearly show which site the submission originated from, and the name of the form that was filled in.

Landing Pages

Customer forms make great multi-purpose lead generation forms and landing pages, especially in combination with our “landing page” feature where you can strip out all the site header and footer content to display a clean, landing-page-style form.

Decorate the form page and make it informative with feature blocks. Use video blocks to grab leads’ attention. Keep the actual form input area clean with as few custom questions as possible - make it quick for potential leads to register their interest.

A clever trick which is especially useful for landing pages is to create a "hidden" custom question to track where incoming leads are coming from. Create a question like "Campaign Source" and mark it as hidden. Create a prefilled scenario with the Campaign Source set to "XXXXX", grab the URL that's generated for you, then replace the XXXX with the different names of potential lead sources and use those links to the landing page instead of the standard link (if you only have a few sources, you could just set up multiple prefilled scenarios). Customers won't see this field in the form, but when they submit the form it will be "passed through" and logged in the Form Submission, giving you insight into where your customers are coming from.

Decide on a lead follow-up flow and use the Form Submissions / Pending view in the admin panel to keep tabs on incoming leads, implement the workflow and mark each as Actioned once follow up is complete.

Trade Customer Registration

Let’s say you are operating a trade/wholesale specific site which only shows prices to logged in customers. You’ll probably want to set up a “Registration” form specific to this site to allow potential customers to request access.

First off, you’d need to decide whether you want to grant access immediately, without any human intervention (Form type = WHOLESALELEAD), or whether an admin needs to review the application and manually grant access (Form type = WHOLESALELEAD-REQUIREMANUAL). The former is obviously more immediate, allowing the customer to log in straight away and potentially order, whilst the latter offers a finer degree of control but risks the customer losing interest if you don't respond quickly. You’ll have to decide which approach is best for your use case.

You’ll probably want to set up a number of specific questions to collect some more detailed information about the lead’s business - for example, a multiple-choice field to find out what “type” of business they are.

Use the Form Submissions / Pending view in the admin panel to keep tabs on incoming registrations and take the necessary follow up action. If you’ve configured the form to require manual approval to grant new customers web access, you’ll need to review each application and “attach” the site to the customer record so they can log in - and probably get back to them to say you’ve done so.

Newsletter Signup

Physical product businesses generally want to sign customers up to their newsletter so they can send them promotional email. In Pakk, each customer has a global ‘opt-in’ setting which is first set when the customer either signs up, places an order, or fills in a form. In all cases, this is through a positive-consent, GDPR compliant checkbox with customisable wording.

Whilst you can present this “opt-in” option on any form, you may want to create a form which is specifically and only to enable email signup. To make this achievable, you can use the Form option Force Signup which leaves the subscription checkbox and message, but disables it, so that it cannot be unchecked (which wouldn’t make any sense for a newsletter signup form).

Don't use the Force Signup option in any other scenario - not only would it be in violation of GDPR principles, it would be highly annoying to customers.

Product Registration

Many businesses like customers to register their purchase. This might be just to establish a touchpoint with a customer, or it might be to maintain a quality-control focused registry of products in use, or perhaps a bit of both.

Use custom questions in a Form to gather information about a customer’s purchase, for example:

• Where as the purchase made?

• Model number

• Serial number

A great option here is to prefill some of the fields, the “Model number” for example, generate the QR code for the prefilled form URL and print that QR code onto labels that can be stuck onto products as they leave the warehouse. Customers would then scan the QR code on receiving the product and be taken to a “Product Registration” form with the the Model number of their product already filled out.

If the product is valuable enough and volume low enough, you could programatically generate URLs and QR codes for all serial numbers too (e.g. with Excel) and then carefully label each product with a QR code that embeds the actual serial number too!

Explicit Agreement to Terms

Forms automatically collect positive-consent to Privacy Policy and global subscription if configured to do do. However you could also use Forms to collect ad-hoc permissions to any other terms and/or conditions that your business needs to apply at any point.

Obviously you don’t need to do this for day-to-day sales through your webstore, as they are automatically collected on each sale.

Let’s say, however, that customers signing up to a particular site you have need to agree to a health warning because of the overly-vibrant colours you’ve chosen, you could set up a custom question as a multiple-choice input (Yes/No) or something like “Input your initials to agree to our health warning”.

Once the form has been submitted, you have a permanent record of the customer’s agreement on the Form Submission record.

Credit Application

Credit applications are common in wholesale businesses and are pain to keep track of. Use customer forms in Pakk to gather all relevant information like:

• Legal company details

• Billing address

• Billing contact

• Credit limit required

• Number of days credit required

• Agreed to credit terms (yes/no, or “write your name to agree”)

It’s quite likely that before filling out a credit form, a customer will have spoken to an admin to outline the terms available, so you could create a number of prefilled form scenarios with “credit limit” and “days credit” set to common values, e.g. £1000 / 60 days. Mark those fields as disabled and then send the generated URL to the form to your customer and they will open the form with the agreed credit terms already filled out and in fact, will not be able to alter them. You could even run the link through a link shortener to obscure those parameters.

Once the form has been submitted, you have a permanent record of the customer’s application, and more importantly, their agreement to your terms. This is stamped in the audit log, so can never be edited.

Make sure you set up a great confirmation email so the customer knows that their application is being reviewed and specify a timeframe within which they can expect an answer.

The post application workflow will look something like:

• Customer receives confirmation email so understands their application is under review

• Admin reviews the application

• If terms are given, admin edits the customer record and applies the agreed days/limit and responds to customer

• If application is rejected, admin does not apply terms to the customer record, and notifies the customer

Request for Consultation

Start with a simple “Contact” form and augment it with some specific questions about the lead’s business and what they are interested in achieving.

Add a field like “Request Contact With” and fill out the choices with the names of company employees. Then create prefilled scenarios for each consultant, download the QR code for each of them and add it to their business cards. Interested leads could then scan the card given to them and be presented with a form to request a consultation, prefilled with the name of the person who gave them the card.