Send a Customer Intake Form

Taking a new customer’s details over the phone means typing while they talk, and you still end up chasing the spelling of a street name. An intake form turns that around: you send a link, they fill in their own details and describe the problem in their own words, and it comes back to you ready to turn into a job.

Before you start

Nothing. There is no form to build first.

Every company starts with a form called New customer intake, and PocketTech creates it the first time anyone sends one. It asks for the customer’s name, best phone number, email, service address, what is going on, how soon they need you, and how they heard about you.

Where to find it

Open Work, Requests in the sidebar.

This is one inbox for everyone who wants work done, whether they came from your online booking page or from an intake form you sent. Each row is tagged with where it came from.

Step 1, Send the form

Click Send intake form. You can fill in as much or as little as you already know:

• Their name and their phone, if you have them. Anything you enter here is pre-filled on the form, so the customer is not asked twice for something they just told you.
• Email it to, if you want PocketTech to send it for you.

Leave the email blank and you get a link back instead, ready to copy and send however you like. That is the one to use when you are on the phone and they would rather have a text.

Step 2, What the customer sees

The link opens a simple page carrying your company name. No login, no app, nothing to install. They answer the questions and submit.

Links are single use and expire, so an old one cannot be passed around or reused. If someone opens a link that has already been used, has expired, or that you have revoked, they are told plainly rather than shown a broken page.

Step 3, Work what comes back

A completed form lands straight back in Requests, and the inbox updates while you are looking at it. You do not need to refresh.

Open the row to read everything the customer wrote, in full, with each answer next to the question that was asked.

Then either:

• Create job, which matches the details to an existing customer by email or phone, creates a new customer if there is no match, and opens a job for the work.
• Decline, if it is not work you are taking.

Settings worth knowing about

Open Management, Settings, Customer Intake. Three things live there:

• Which form to send. Defaults to your newest intake form.
• What happens when one comes back. Turn this on and a submission becomes a customer and a job on its own, with no triage step. Useful if you would rather clear the inbox than work it, but you lose the chance to decline before a record is created.
• How long a link lasts. Anywhere from one day to a year.

Changing the questions

The intake form appears in your normal forms list, so you can edit it like any other form: reword questions, add your own, reorder them.

What’s next

• Add your first customer if you would rather enter someone by hand.
• Create your first job to see where a converted request ends up.
• Build your dispatch board to get the new job scheduled.