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When a form adds someone to the CRM, where do their answers go?

· 3 min read
Jon-Michael Lastimosa
Jon-Michael Lastimosa
Senior Web Developer

The question: "If the visitor enters his name and email in a form, does it get sent to the CRM? How will the other fields be saved? Like on a booking form, there's a custom package field. Will the CRM auto-create the custom fields?"

Context​

Until now a contact form reached the CRM only to subscribe someone to the newsletter, and only when they ticked a consent box. An enquiry without that tick never became a contact, which is the opposite of what a CRM is for. The fix had to keep the consent rule (nobody gets campaign emails without agreeing) and answer a harder question: a booking form holds a full name, a phone number, a date, a package, a car's make and model, and a message, and they are not all the same kind of data.

Form Entries already keeps every submission with all of its fields, so nothing is ever lost whatever the CRM does.

Options considered​

Create a custom field for every form field automatically. No setup, but the date, package and message would become contact fields that each new booking overwrites, and contact pages would fill up with one-off answers.

Save only name, email and phone. Simple, but the person's car (or company, or anything else they tell you that stays true) never becomes searchable or usable in a segment.

Let the user choose per field, pre-filled (chosen). A table of the form's fields, each with a dropdown: contact fields, existing custom fields, "+ New custom field", or "Only on the timeline". Name, email, phone and fields matching an existing custom field are filled in automatically; everything else starts on the timeline.

Decision​

  • A contact form can add the sender to the CRM (status "none": in the CRM, not subscribed). Subscribing stays a separate switch that needs a ticked consent box.
  • Answers that describe the person go on the contact; answers about one request stay with the submission. The whole submission is always on the contact's timeline, with a link to its entry.
  • The CRM creates custom fields only for the fields set to "+ New custom field", from the form field's label, type and options, when the page is saved. The link follows the field, not its label.
  • An existing contact's details are only filled where empty by default, and differences are noted.
  • A booking can also become a deal (the package as its product and value, the date as its close date) or a meeting on the chosen date. That is where per-booking data becomes something to act on.

Why​

A contact record is about a person, so it should only hold what stays true about them. A booking's date and package belong to that booking: on the timeline, they keep every booking side by side; as a deal or meeting, they land on the pipeline or calendar where someone follows them up. Pre-filling the table keeps the common case to one switch, and leaving the rest on the timeline means a beginner never ends up with a cluttered contact page they did not ask for.

Status: Accepted (CRM 1.0.68).