Build and use forms

Structured capture that writes into your contact schema, and lands on the activity feed where somebody will see it.

Admin about 8 min to do · 7 steps

Forms sit under Organisation in settings, beside contact attributes and lead stages — which is a good clue to how they work. A form writes into your contact schema, so what it can capture is determined by the attributes you have defined.

Submissions land on the contact's activity feed as captured entries, and a workflow can trigger on them. That last part is what turns a form from a data-collection exercise into a process: a submission that nobody acts on is worse than no form, because the customer believes they have told you something.

Forms sits between Channels and Users — it creates contacts, so it belongs with the things that define them.

Before you start

Admin access.
Your contact schema defined first — a form cannot write to an attribute that does not exist.
A decision about what happens after a submission.

Define the attributes before you build the form

A form field maps to a contact attribute. Building the form first and the schema second means rebuilding the form.

Forms sits with Contact attributes and Lead stages under ORGANISATION — all three define what a contact is and how one is created.

Ask for the minimum

Every field costs completions, steeply on a phone. Ask for what you cannot proceed without and collect the rest in conversation.

Use typed fields rather than free text

A dropdown that maps to a dropdown attribute keeps the data reportable. Free text that maps to a dropdown attribute will not fit.

Set what a submission creates

A contact, with an owner and a lead stage. A submission that creates an unowned contact is a lead in nobody's calling list.

Build the workflow that acts on it

Form submitted is a trigger. Assign it, acknowledge it, create a task — decide before you publish, not after.

Check the submission on the activity feed

Captured submissions appear there, so the person who eventually speaks to this customer can see what they told you.

Test it as a stranger

On a phone, in a private window. Then follow the resulting contact all the way through whatever should happen next.

Check it worked

Submit the form yourself and time how long it takes for a human to make contact. That number is your speed to lead, and it is the metric most reliably connected to revenue in this whole product.

Worth knowing

The parts people get wrong

A form that creates contacts with no owner produces leads nobody calls. Set the owner on the form.
Captured form submissions land on the activity feed and can trigger a workflow. Use both.