Anonymous Survey Events

The next event type we’ll cover allows customized forms to be developed and users to complete those forms on-line without requiring that registrants create a login profile on the web-site in the process. This is a useful event type if you want to make it fast and easy for people to respond to your form. Their response is streamlined because site visitors are not required to login or create a new member profile before completing an on-line form. Examples of where “anonymous” style registration forms may be used are:

Contact Us Forms: Simple forms exposed to the general public allowing someone to quickly enter an inquiry that is then captured in the database in a standard way without actually needing to create a membership record on your system.

Service Call Requests: for businesses that are service oriented, receiving requests for service from the general public, sample forms can be created that allow inquiries to be captured in a standard way so that they become available to busy registrars or business owners via their cell-phones or wireless-enabled personal digital assistants.

Simple Waiting Lists: If you are sold out of a particular product, you can implement a waiting list where your customers can “queue” on-line. The system will store lists of all of the respondents including the date and time they filled in the form and you may download these lists in spreadsheet form at any time.

Quotation Requests: By allowing prospective customers to accurately describe a job to you on-line, business owners can help reduce “back and forth” and “phone tag” and respond to inquiries with more accurately with relevant information. Capturing needed information for quote requests can save time, improve service levels and drive high win-rates for competitive businesses.

For this simple anonymous event type where we gather information from the public, only two sections of the definition form need to be completed after creating an anonymous style event.

Registration Configuration: On this screen you’ll configure details such as who to send notifications to when an on-line form has been submitted, whether to send specific documents from the document library as a part of your acknowledgement e-mail etc.

Setup Data Collection Fields: This is where the actual questions are defined and users are provided specific instructions on how to go about answering the questions. There is an opportunity when creating this form to provide a text “pre-amble” to the questionnaire to provide users of the form with more specific instructions on how to fill it in, how to get additional information and so on. Because the text pre-amble exists for this type of event, the normal event description text is not normally required for these simple anonymous forms.

Note that although only two of the properties need to be setup for this type of event to function as explained above, we can choose to enable other properties if we wish. For example, we could modify the price properties for a form if we wanted to require payment along with a form submission. Also, we could provide a description of the event that displays before a web-site visitor presses continue by making sure we have the “Event Description Text” configured and the value “Skip this screen” set to no. Even though there are only nine standard event types provided, we can mix and match properties from these event types to get behavior that matches the businesses process we are seeking to implement.