At my old job I had forms that had to be manually filled out at an Initial Consultation. It was annoying for many reasons, such as:
- Small text boxes.
- I have bad penmanship.
- Two surgeries on my wrist prevents me from writing for long periods of time.
- Sometimes I’d miss a signature and the boss would get mad.
- Sometimes the client had questions about the service agreement I wasn’t qualified to answer.
And most importantly:
- Filling out these forms took up too much time when we could be talking about things to help them now.
If you are still doing it this way I hope you are at least using a laptop/tablet! I didn’t have that option at the time.
When I went out on my own the first thing I did was find a way to create a form the client can fill out ahead of time, digitally. There are many options for accomplishing this. I settled on the free version of Jotform and in about two years I haven’t hit the limit. Google Forms is another option.
After the form is completed a few different things happen using the Jotform integrations that I used to do manually:
- A folder is created in Google Drive labeled CLIENT NAME & DOG .
- Pdf copy is dropped in that folder.
- Copy of responses sent to me and client.
- Responses copied to a google sheet for backup purposes.
- Which triggers sending the service agreement for a digital signature but that’s another story.
- Subscribe to my email newsletter.
The form is filled out even before they schedule their initial consultation. I was having trouble getting people to fill it out in a timely manner, So, after paying their invoice the link to the intake form gets sent to them instead of scheduling. After it’s completed they get redirected to my scheduling system.
At some point this year I’m going to move this form in-house using my web builder. I just need to sort out some work flows.