What a custom form does
A form lets you ask a customer to fill in a form online instead of returning it on paper or by email — whatever you collect from customers today, from an account application to a change of bank or contact details. The customer gets an email with a link, fills the form in on the Customer Portal, and their answers arrive on the customer's record in Kolleno. What happens to the answers from there is set per form — see What happens to the answers below.
Each form mirrors one of your own forms: the same pages, sections and questions, in your brand colour.
Note: Forms are set up for you by Kolleno — there is no form builder in the app yet. To get one, send your Customer Success Manager the form you use today or the list of questions, and tell them what should happen with the answers.
What your customer sees
The customer receives an email built from one of your email templates, with a link to the form. The link opens the form on the Customer Portal without any login, on a computer or a phone. After submitting, the customer sees a confirmation with a read-back of their answers and can re-open the link to correct them.
Email:
Form page:
Submitted form:
When the form is sent, and how customers are reminded
Sending is automatic. The form is tied to a stage on the customer's record in your accounting or ERP system — Prospect, for example. Every hour, Kolleno looks for customers who are now at that stage and emails them the form.
Each customer is sent a given form once, however many times their stage changes.
A customer who has already filled the form in is never sent it again.
A customer with no email address on file is skipped and tried again the next hour.
The form can be limited to part of your customer base, such as one subsidiary.
Reminders follow if the form is not filled in: a fixed number of days apart, up to a total number of emails that includes the first one. Reminders stop on their own when the customer submits the form, when the customer leaves the stage the form is tied to (they moved on, so the form is moot), or when the allowance is used up.
Note: The first time a form goes live it is sent to every customer currently at that stage, not only new ones. Kolleno runs a dry run with you first so the number is known before anything is sent.
What happens to the answers
Answers are stored encrypted on the customer's record. The rest depends on what was set up for the form:
Custom fields. Chosen answers are copied onto the customer's custom fields — company name, registration number and so on — so they can be shown in tables, used in filters and picked up by workflows. Sensitive answers such as bank details are never copied here.
Contacts. A group of answers — name, email, phone, address — becomes a contact on the customer, with the role you choose for it.
NetSuite. Answers are written to fields on the customer's record in NetSuite, bank details included. The customer has to be synced from NetSuite for this to work.
PDF. A document reproducing your own form, with the answers in place, is saved to the customer's Files tab as <Form name> - <Customer name> - <date>. It is for your team; the customer is not sent it.
E-signature. The PDF is sent for signature to the person named in the form — the signatory's name and email come from the answers — and the request, its status and the signed copy appear in the Files tab exactly as for a document you send by hand. See Sending a document for e-signature.
On the customer's timeline, the invitation shows as a sent email with its delivery status, and each submission shows as a note naming the form. The answers themselves never appear on the timeline.
Corrections
A customer can re-open their link and click Correct my answers at any time. The corrected answers are stored as a submission of their own, so the earlier ones stay on record, and Kolleno processes them the same way: custom fields take the newest answer and a contact created from the form is updated rather than duplicated.
Sensitive answers
Questions such as account number and sort code are marked sensitive when the form is set up. A sensitive answer is:
stored encrypted,
shown masked to the last four characters on the confirmation page and wherever Kolleno previews the answers
printed in full in the PDF, since that is the document your team works from,
allowed into NetSuite, but never into custom fields or contacts.
Common questions
A customer says they never received the form. Open their timeline: the invitation is there as a sent email, with its delivery status.
Can the form be changed after customers have filled it in? Yes. Every submission keeps the version of the form it was answered against, so previews and PDFs stay correct.
Can the form be sent again to one customer? Yes — ask your Customer Success Manager or support@kolleno.com.
A customer sees "This link isn't active anymore". The form has been switched off, or the link was opened by someone other than the customer it was sent to. Contact us and we will send a fresh link.
Do subsidiaries need their own forms? Yes. A form belongs to one company in Kolleno, so each subsidiary gets its own form.
To set up a custom web form, or change what an existing one does with its answers, contact your Customer Success Manager or email support@kolleno.com