How to Use Forms in SmartSuite for Agency Client Work Requests (Beginner Tutorial)

In this video, I'm going to show you how to use SmartSuite forms to collect information in a structured way from your internal users or your external audience. The forms information, as you get it all set up, will create records inside your SmartSuite account to help you organize all your information in one convenient view or layout. When we get this all dialed in, you'll walk away knowing what SmartSuite forms are, what what are the key features you need to know, and what should you watch out for to make sure that your forms look as professional as possible? If you haven't already, be sure to Sign up for SmartSuite using our affiliate link in the description below. Thanks SmartSuite for sponsoring this video. Let's get started. Here we are inside the Agency Marketing Showcase template in SmartSuite. What is this, you might ask? This is one of SmartSuite's solution templates that you can add into your account inside your SmartSuite account for no additional charge. Just search for the word Agency and you'll see this dude's smiling face and click Use Template. Once you're inside here though, navigate to the app called Work Requests, because that's where we're going to find our example form together. If you already have a form in your own account, you can skip this step just as a reminder. But here's what we're going to be looking at together. This form is a view a little bit more fun or applicable to what we're talking about. So in this case, let's think about our brand voice. If we're a fun, sassy brand, we might say something like hit the easy button saying that hey, once you submit this request, it's going to be done. It's the easy way to go through this project request or get it done. You know, those kinds of things. Or you can be boring and we can just do send in request. But either way, let's avoid the boring default submit button. Guys, we can be more creative than that, especially if we are a marketing agency. All right, so send in requests is our boring option here. Now once we have this, we're going to flip over to settings in the settings area. All we can really do at this point point is to determine what happens after submission. Now for most people keeping things real simple, what we're going to want to have here is just a little message saying hey, we've got your message. So here we have a display message. This will show up anytime the form is submitted as the after submission confirmation page. However, once again, if we want to be More fancy. We might want to put a redirect URL here. What does that mean? That just means when someone hits the submit button or whatever more creative variety of button name we have, it will send them to a different page. It. It'll still submit the form, don't worry. But it'll send them to a page that you can fully customize. So you might have a page on your website called what to expect after submitting a work request. That page has its own URL which you could put right here and you could have a video explaining what happens next, a real time view of the project timeline or the lead time that you currently have, how back ordered you are, whatever that could be a custom page you design if you have a little bit more time. But for now we'll keep it simple and just keep with the display message. Now heading back over to the Edit form option, we've pretty much wrapped up all the things we have. The last thing we need to do in order to make this form available to our external stakeholders is to click Share form. This is going to generate a shareable link that we can send to anybody, anywhere and have them fill it in to create a new request. This link can be sent to your clients in whatever format that you prefer to use, whether it's slack, a text message, an email, but but once you send it out to those clients, you ensure that all of those responses get sent to the same spot. So you no longer have to wrangle a bunch of type forms and Google forms and text messages and emails. No, all of your client requests will end up in the same one spot of this one app inside of SmartSuite, which is pretty convenient. Now that we have everything set up here though, the last thing we want to do is test out this form for ourselves. To do that, we're going to click on the preview in a new tab button to open up our form as if we were a client. Once we're here, we can see see all of the different fields that we just created. First off, we've got the name of the request, we have the description of work, we have the company name. Once we fill out this form, we have the ability to click send in request. Once we submit the form, we see our confirmation message that we typed in in the last step and we should be good to go to finally confirm that though we're going to go into our own work request by company and locate our request to make sure it's there safely. Here we can see that this request did indeed come in with all of the fields that we had added. So this is how we can make a basic work request form for this particular use case. However, I want to show you one variation of this in case you want to take it a little bit further. In this example, we have folks add their company name into the form so we know who we are working for. But if you wanted to be a little bit more specific with your form, you could also choose to have this be customized so that people are actually choosing from a dropdown of existing clients. What that might look like is having a client linked record field in the form itself. So it'll show you what this looks like in the form. It looks something like this. We have client, we have name request and all this other stuff. So rather than having to type out my company name, I can just have a dropdown of all of the potential names I could choose from. Please only do this route if you are using anonymized client IDs or client codes or you somehow don't need to maintain client confidentiality. However, if you are trying to maintain client confidentiality, I want to be very clear you do not want to do this approach. Just have people type it in. It's okay. But for the rest of you, this could be a nice option to make sure that you can organize what the request is for. This can also be great if this form is going to be used internally. So if you have team members who are on the phone with your clients and then they get a request and they're submitting it internally, it could be great to have this linked record field right here. So that way you don't have another text field where there could be potential typos. You're instead just selecting from the dropdown who exactly you have on the phone who is requesting work. If you were using this form internally so you had team members in charge of it, I would also take a few moments to add some additional internal forms because when it comes to your team members, you can generally request a little bit more information than when your clients who are super busy are asking for your help. One of the fields I might add would be something like a signature field to make sure we can track who is signing off on this or who is submitting this request. Or I could add something like a file attachments form so I could connect any deliverables or examples that the client was sharing with me via email or via my phone. So I'm going to add these fields in. Again, just like everything else, you would want to add a customized name and maybe some help text, but when we drag these fields onto the thing and we add some great explanation to them, if we go back to our overall form and refresh that, we can now see this all come to life as we have our whole field here, all of our pieces ready to go, and the ability to easily add attachments if we want to add additional context. So that concludes this beginner tutorial of how to go about creating a Client Request form inside of SmartSuite. We've talked through some key features and things to watch out for and even how we could expand this client request form if we wanted to have a more internal or super powered user fill. There's a certain convenience that comes with just having a link and a form that you can fill in from anywhere to make it really easy for your team, for your clients, and for yourself to get data into SmartSuite with a SmartSuite. What did I just say? There's really nothing that is easier than that form link. That's what I was trying to say. I don't know where smartsmeet came from. Thank you guys so much for watching this video though. I hope this was a helpful primer on forms. If you have certain use cases you'd like to see or certain other words you'd like to see me butcher, please do leave them in the comments below. I'm waiting for someone to leave like a long tongue twister down there. I appreciate you guys watching. I hope this was helpful. Until next time, enjoy the process.