Connect Forms: Every Website Enquiry in One Searchable Inbox
Contact and feedback form messages from all your websites and services, gathered into one searchable inbox in Client Connect. Self-service and on for every account.
If you run more than one website, or collect messages through more than one service, you will know the feeling. An enquiry lands in one inbox, a piece of feedback in another, and a third message sits in a folder you only check once a month. Somewhere along the way, a customer is waiting for a reply that never comes.
Connect Forms is our answer. It is a feature of Client Connect, our in-house customer portal, and it gathers the messages from your contact and feedback forms into one place, inside your Client Connect account. It is a self-service feature, and it is now enabled for all Client Connect accounts, so there is nothing to wait for and nothing to pay extra to switch on.
What is Connect Forms?
Connect Forms gives you a single, easy-to-use dashboard for the messages your forms collect. Instead of checking several mailboxes, plugins or website admin areas, you sign in to Client Connect and everything is there, ready to read and act on.
It works with the contact forms on your website, including forms built with Elementor, and with the feedback forms you use to hear from customers. If you have several websites, or use more than one service to collect messages, they can all feed into the same inbox.
Self-mapping: no need to rename your form fields
Every form names its fields differently. One calls the email box email, another your-email, another Email Address. Rather than ask you to rebuild your forms to suit us, Connect Forms uses self-mapping. It looks at the fields your form sends and attempts to match the common ones, such as name, email address, phone number and message, to the matching fields in your Connect Forms inbox.
The aim is to minimise the need to change your existing form field names. In most cases you can connect a form as it is, and the messages arrive in the right places in your inbox.
Why it helps a small business
- One place to look. No more logging in to several websites or hunting through different mailboxes to see what has come in.
- Searchable. Looking for last month’s enquiry? Search the dashboard and find it in seconds, instead of scrolling through old emails.
- You will not miss anything. You get an email and a notification for each new enquiry, so a potential customer is never left waiting.
- Enquiries and feedback side by side. See what new customers are asking for and what existing ones think, all in one list.
- Secure. Your messages sit behind your Client Connect sign-in, not in a plugin on a website.
What it looks like in practice
Imagine a plumber with a main website, a second site for another area and a feedback form they send to customers after each job. Without Connect Forms, that is three places to check, and one is always forgotten. With it, every message arrives in the same list in Client Connect. A new enquiry from either website, or a five-star comment from a happy customer, is one search or one click away.
Works with the Small Business CRM too
If you use the Small Business CRM in Client Connect (also in beta), enquiries from your website forms can go straight in as new contacts and deals through a secure webhook. That means no more copying details from an email into a spreadsheet.
Built in-house and improving all the time
Like the rest of Client Connect, Connect Forms is developed in-house by our team in Swindon, and new features and improvements are added regularly. It is currently in beta, so we are still polishing it, and we would love to hear what would make it more useful. You can tell us through Feature Suggestions in your Client Connect account.
How to get started
Connect Forms is self-service, and it is already switched on for every Client Connect account. Sign in, open Connect Forms and connect your forms yourself. Self-mapping does the matching of your form fields for you, so you can usually start receiving messages in your inbox without changing your forms.
If you would rather not do it yourself, or one of your forms uses unusual field names, raise a support ticket from your Client Connect account and we will be happy to help. If you are not yet a Client Connect customer, get in touch and we will talk you through it.
