Last Updated on April 30, 2020 by Rakesh Gupta

** Disclaimer – If you buy FormTitan I will not get any commission. This is just an educational blog post.

Touchpoints between your clients and company can be many and for several reasons – through the corporate website, clients inquire about their order; or, about products and services offered by your company; at times, clients may reach out to your company via email to check on their case status. These touch points can be a double-edge sword – It could be a sign of increasing client engagement with your company; however, if the process is not managed appropriately, it can shoot up the cost per engagement and negatively impact ROI. The trick is to promote a high level of client engagement, while at the same time, keeping down the cost of engagement. The key to achieving these conflicting objectives is to automate client engagement process!

Online forms are one of the most popular tools to promote client/partners/prospect engagement with your company while keeping the cost per engagement manageable. As good as this sounds, not all forms are made equal! It could be a cinch to integrate some forms with Salesforce while others may be too complicated. When latter is the case, you have to either manually import data into Salesforce – a recipe for that may compromise data integrity; or, you may have to hire expert help – making the client engagement process cost-prohibitive. At other times, some forms may offer one-way integration with Salesforce requiring a careful mapping between fields on the forms and on the records in Salesforce. Then there are forms with advanced features and functionalities that allow two-way integration – between Salesforce and your company’s website and vice-versa. To get the best bang for the buck, it is important to understand client requirements and based on that, select, among various available options, the most appropriate type of form(s).

Let us explore how forms integrate with Salesforce to promote client engagement. There are a number of ways through which you can integrate a form on your website with Salesforce. Few of them are as follows:

1. Web-to-Lead
2. Web-to-Case 
3. Force.com site (using Visualforce page) – Developer Skill sets are required 

As always, there are pros and cons associated with each of the above options:

1. Web-to-lead/web-to-case allows you to only capture up to 500 new leads per day from your website. 
2. Web-to-lead/web-to-case, furthermore, has one-way integration with Salesforce. It means they can only pass the data to Salesforce. For example, once a case is submitted through web-to-case, you can not allow your clients to view all existing open cases and update their status. 
3. Web-to-lead/web-to-case, last but not least, can create records on Lead and Case objects respectively. However, if you want to capture data on any other object then you have to consider Force.com site (including Visualforce page, Apex, and Visual Workflow experience). Here is an example of a Force.com site form https://rakeshistom2-developer-edition.gus.force.com/SalesforceIDConverter/
4. Features, such as, generate PDF file once a form is submitted, are not available out-of-the-box. To achieve such productivity, high-level developer skills are needed.

Remember, the trick is to promote the high level of client engagement while keeping down the cost of engagement. And, the key to achieve these conflicting objectives is to automate client engagement process!

There are few possible solutions to untangle the above business scenario as follows:

1. Implement Community (you must purchase the licenses)
2. Use Force.com site with Visual Workflow (this will not give you an exact solution, as Flow doesn’t support Inline editing in table)
3. Use FormTitan – see the screenshot below:

FormTitan allows you to display the data from multiple objects. For example, you can display contact as well as case records, as shown in the following screenshot:

Customizations displayed in the aforementioned screenshot were achieved by the drag-and-drop method and without using a single code! This makes FormTitan a powerful tool for businesses that want to minimize code usages and quickly create a form as per the requirements.

FormTitan forms provide a powerful Bi-Directional integration with Salesforce. This integration allows you to read data from Salesforce objects and also write to Salesforce objects. It supports any Salesforce object you may need and allows you to deal with many objects at the same time. What is even more amazing is that this is all done in real time – so if you have, for example, just read data and then update it in Salesforce, the next time you read the data again (even a second later) it will be updated.

Business Use Case -2

There are few possible solutions to untangle the above business scenario as follows:

1. Use Force.com site with Visualforce page (because Visual Workflow doesn’t support file data type) 
2. Use API to integrate custom forms with Salesforce
3. Use FormTitan – see the screenshot below:

As shown in the above screenshot, the candidates are able to create a contact record. There is a lookup field that allows them to select a right job. If you look at the form carefully there is a placeholder to upload the resume. Once candidate clicks on the Submit button it will create a contact record and save the resume to File related list. 

The Lookup is a special element that is used with the Salesforce integration. It allows you to create a search box for your users, enabling them to search inside Salesforce objects and choose an item. It is also possible to include Google ReCaptcha on the form. 

Benefits of using FormTitan

FormTitan is a flexible and powerful tool that creates online forms and surveys that automatically populate information anywhere in Salesforce. It is extremely customizable with many options for branding and design to make it look and feel like your own. To streamline client engagement process, the following are some of the many reasons to explore the feature and functionalities of FormTitan:

1. Non-technical staff can manage form
2. Ability to insert/update/delete data to multiple objects simultaneously
3. Populate data from multiple objects into your form
4. Bi-directional integration with Salesforce
5. PDF Composer
6. SmartV –Two-factor authentication for your Salesforce data, so that only a right customer has access to update the data, even though the form is accessible publicly. 
7. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) engine
8. A/B testing: create variations and compare results
9. Online chat within your form
10. Payment Integration – Collect money worldwide including single and recurring payment (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly) all within Salesforce. 
11. Various options to publish your form including ExitForm, Pop-up, and iFrame, etc. 
12. Last but not least, it allows you to create beautiful landing pages.  

Technical Editor and Proofreader: - Munira Majmundar