Forms a customer fills in, that somebody types up afterward
The customer is waiting inside the gap between the form and the record.
A new customer who filled in a form does not exist to the business until somebody types it up.
Not every business has this problem, and some should leave it alone.
Most of these can be done better. Whether it's worth doing is a separate question. What follows is one common form of the problem, described in general terms, because your version will differ. These are possible challenges, not a description of your business, and some should be left exactly as they are. If it sounds like your week, that's worth a conversation.
Watch: How Paper Gets Into Your System
Sound familiar?
- A form filled in this morning is still sitting in a tray at lunch.
- A customer called back and had to give their details again.
- A form got misplaced and nobody ever knew.
- An email address was misread and the bounce never got noticed.
What it looks like
A customer provides their information: name, phone, what they need. They write it on a form, or say it over the phone while someone writes it down. Later, an hour or a day on, somebody types what they wrote into the system.
What it costs
Every other task in this guide concerns information that already happened. This one concerns somebody who has just raised their hand and is now in a queue they cannot see. Between the form and the entry, that person does not exist to the business: nobody can look them up or be assigned to them. If they call back, whoever answers has no record and asks for everything again, the worst impression a business can make on someone who already gave their details once. If they were comparing options, the business that responds first often wins, not because it is better, but because it responded while the person was still deciding. And a form that is never entered at all represents a customer silently dropped, with nothing to ever surface that.
Where it goes wrong
- Handwriting decides whether someone can be contacted. A misread email address produces a plausible, undeliverable one, and nothing bounces to anyone's attention.
- The form asks for things the system does not store, so the useful extra detail is discarded at the moment of entry.
- Duplicates get created quietly when an existing customer fills in a form as though new.
- Required fields get invented to satisfy a system that will not save a blank.
What a better version looks like
The shortest path lets the customer's own typing be the record, checking as it goes for an address, phone number or email that looks wrong. Where paper has to stay, for a waiting area or a job site, the form can be photographed and the record created from the image, with anything uncertain flagged. Either way, the part worth protecting is arrival: a new enquiry should reach somebody immediately, not when the tray is next worked through.
Questions worth asking about your own operation
- How long between a form being filled in and it becoming a record?
- If someone called back an hour later, would you already know who they are?
- How would you know if a form was never entered at all?
If this sounds familiar
Bring me the version you actually have. I'll learn how the process really works before I suggest anything. If it isn't worth changing, or isn't a fit for me, I'll say so. Talk through a problem