Forms for customers to complete with prefilled info

[Elliot]

Hi Monday Community,

I have a questions about forms. I have had some good experience using the for my hiring staff process. It saves a lot of time filtering out all the time wasters dropping in a resume.

1. I can ask the questions I want to know the answers to and don’t have to sift through resumes.
2. If they can’t be bothered filling out the form they don’t want the job.

I would like to use the form format when planning for a customers private function/event.
I typically need information such as:

• Food requirements
• Drink requirements
• Number of Guests
• Start time
• Finish time
• Music requirements

etc etc.

The thing is I don’t want to send out a blank form to the customer to sort through all our emails and figured out everything we agreed on prior to booking the event. We have most of the information already from speaking to them when selling the venue and taking notes as we go.

I would like to send the customer an Email(preferably automated) that says something like “Hey, in preparation for your event could you please follow this “link”, check all the details are correct and fill in anything we have missed”

The customer would click the link and be presented a monday style form however all the details we have on them are already pre-filled and they are just filling in any blanks or adjustments. For example it might say:

• Number of guests: 60

And they decide they want to change that to 70 because of some unexpected +1’s so they update that and it updates on our board.

So I guess my questions is:

Can I use monday forms to adjust an existing item on a board or are they only set up to create a new item every time?

If no, my follow up question is:
How would you achieve something like this?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Cheers,

Elliot.

[stephenh]

+1 I also want the ability to prefill/prepopulate forms (perhaps via query parameters). If it could be used to update existing items that’d be a great bonus, but that’s not required for my core need. My core need is simply to make the form easier to fill out by providing different prefilled form links to different teams.

[francescolaffi]

I would also find prefills for new items useful for similar reasons, but the lack of response rom Monday is not encouraging. Similar tools have this functionality.

I understand if updating existing item is instead more complex for security concerns, but most use cases can do without.

[bmeyers05]

I would like to see something like this as well. We have a use for a sign-off form on client projects where the project manager or admin would fill out the client data ahead of time and leave spots for the person in the field to fill out the final data, and hopefully grab a signature somehow using Monday. I would want the field person to be able to use a link and see the pulse in a form view though. They would not need to see the board.

[Elliot]

Well said,

That would be perfect.
I found it hard to articulate what I was after but I am glad there are more after the same thing.

This one pretty much says it best.

[Elliot]

I posed the question to monday support staff and this was their response for those who are interested:

Hi there, Elliot,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to help!

It is not possible to edit a preexisting form submission. Technically, this would just require a new form submission by the user/staff member!

You could have an integration set up with Integromat that when someone submits a form, it will create a “if this, then that” scenario. If you were to integrate monday.com with integromat, which is a third party platform, you can check out these articles for a bit more information:

Can monday.com integrate with other softwares?

How to create an automation or integration with Integromat

Additionally, here’s the integration I found for monday.com and IFTTT using Integromatt: https://www.integromat.com/en/integrations/dapulse/ifttt

If you need further support, we also have an option for a paid assistance from one of our certified monday.com partners. I’d be more than happy to contact one for you - just let me know if you’re interested!

I am afraid the only other way to handle a form submission that needs editing is to do this manually or to have a user resubmit a new form entry!

Does this clarify?

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Best,
Tara

[Elliot]

I am going to build my own work around when I get to it. This might help for some.

I am going to use @upitchika HTML email app. It is a free one he created and has more features than the standard email integration. I’ve given him plenty of feedback and he is always quick to update where needed. So that’s just a quick shout out to him and a warning that it’s not a polished approved marketplace app yet but it works well for me!
Link for reference: https://devpost.com/software/html-email-c5kt8w

For my work around:
I am going to make an email template and use merge tags to prefill the information we already have.

The template would look something like this:

Hey item name,
We are looking forward to your event on customer date and would like to confirm all our information is up to date.
Please look at the questions below and adjust anything where necessary and fill in any blanks.

Date of event: customer date
Bump in time: Short text box 01
Guest arrive time: Short text box 02
Drink requirements: long text box 01
Food requirements: long text box 02
Etc
etc
etc

The trigger will just be a status box that has 3 status’s.
“Unsent, Send email, Sent”

The integration will be "when status changes to send email send template event plan info to customer email. "

The automation will be "When status changed to send email change status to email sent.

Then when the customer responds we just have to fill in the blanks. This will save time drafting an email manually which is how we have been doing it. Obviously I would prefer the monday form format as I believe it is a bit more user/customer friendly but this will do for now.

Hope that helps some people. If you need any more info let me know. I can provide screenshots when I have actually built it if anyone wants them.

Cheers,

Elliot.

[jjay.lewin]

It would be super cool to see the final result in some way!

[Elliot]

Sorry for the slow reply on this. Had some time off and have been playing catch up for the year.

I’ve had my work around built and it is working a treat.

Step 1 is to confirm all details are filled out.

To help with this I have made a nice obvious warning that an email will be sent. This is the default status.
There is a red status with an arrow reminding the user to prefill all the info.

Step 2 is to change status to “send email”.
This triggers this integration.

It also triggers this automation.

The email that is sent to the customer looks like this.

Step 3 is for the customer to reply and the user to update all the columns in monday appropriately.

I hope that helps @jjay.lewin with your use case or anyone else with a similar process.

Cheers,

Elliot.