Custom Form overview
Type-1 Type-2
Why customize forms?Below we document how new forms are created. This section addresses why you might want a custom form.
Standard contact formOur own custom contact form
At right is the standard contact form as provided with each account. It is suitable for many types of business to
business messages.
Below the standard form is a custom form. It is our own internal customer contact form. It is an edited version of the standard contact form. Since we file by account name rather than by company name, we capture the account name information. Usually they are the same but when they differ, we want the account name. The standard form does not make this separation. While this distinction is useful to us, the distinction can be tedious for many. Rather than offer you only one choice, the ability to customize a form allows you to make your own choice. The checkboxes added to the custom form do not affect the handling (except urgent) but are there for historical analysis to know that we are being proactive (not waiting for customer to call).. The "why" of having a custom form is that it is more efficient for us than the standard form. Further, the custom form allows organizing the information taken to later searches.
Note that the background colors differ. This merely reflects the last color used
in the site and is not a property of the form itself.
It is not necessary for you to create a custom form to use Telephone Message Pad. Many of our customers use the standard forms. However, slightly over half have edited our standard forms to create their own variants. We definitely support you having information served to meet your needs. Two types of templatesAbove, we show an example of a Type-1 template. There is also a Type-2 template. They are optimized differently and which is "best" is a matter of suitability to task.The difference between the two is technical. Type-1 form stores the template and data in separate files while Type-2 stores everything in a single file. This leads to the following characteristics:
A Type-2 template is used to implement the billing form. All other forms are Type-1. |