To demonstrate how you can easily customize RapidStart CRM to meet your needs, we created this "Tips and Tricks" Series. In this series we will outline some simple-to-perform solutions to common things customers ask about RapidStart CRM. Enjoy!
UPDATE: For an even easier way to do this, check out our free web contact form addon
Contact Us
You will not find many websites that do not have a “Contact Us” form. One thing that many users would like to be able to do is to have that form submit it’s data directly into RapidStartCRM as a Prospect. There are actually many different ways to accomplish this depending on the complexity of your form and your website platform. For this exercise we will use something that can be used universally. These are the steps:
- Create a Microsoft Form
- Create a Power Automate flow
- Testing
- Add Form to your Website
Create a Microsoft Form
First log into https://www.office.com, this link will take you to the Microsoft Forms page. Let’s start by creating a new form by clicking on the “+ New Form” button. Give it a title and add whatever fields you need by clicking the “+ Add new” button. (Most experts say that on a “Contact Us” form you should ask for the minimum information you need.)
You can select a Theme in the header bar that most closely matches your website, and Preview your finished form. Once satisfied, click on the Share button.
Select the option “anyone can respond”, then select the embed button </>, and copy and save the code to Notepad for the last step.
Create a Power Automate Flow
Log into Power Automate
The first thing you will want to do is select the environment were you have installed RapidStartCRM from the top right under “Environments”. Then in the left sidebar select “My Flows”. Then click on “+ New flow” in the header and select “Automated cloud flow”.
In this dialog box, you can give your flow a name, then select the trigger entitled “When a new response is Submitted” Microsoft Forms. Then click “Create”.
You may be asked to login to make the Forms connection, then you will be presented with a dropdown list to select the form you created earlier, select your form and then click “+ New step”.
In the “Choose an Operation” panel, look for “Get response details”, again select the same “Contact Us” form. In the Response Id field, click on the dynamic selector and search for “Response ID” and click it. It should look like above. Then click “+ New step”
In the “Choose an Operation” panel, look for “Dataverse” and select the action “add a new row”. You may be asked to login again to make the Dataverse connection. Select “Contacts” as the Table name.
The Column list will appear for the Contacts Table, you may want to click the “Show advanced options” to see all available columns. Now we are just going to map the items over. In the Last Name field click the dynamic selector and search for “Last Name” from the form response. You can repeat this for each item in the form. In our case First Name, Email and Inquiring about (which we mapped to the description column). We can also update other values directly, for example we can set the Contact Status to “Active Prospect”. When you are done, click on the Flow Checker to see if you have any technical errors, then Save. Your flow is now ready to go.
Testing
To make sure everything is working as intended, you will want to test it. Go back to your Contact Us form that you created in the first step and click on “Preview”. Fill in some test data and submit. Now login to RapidStartCRM and look in your Prospects list for the new record that was created. If all went well, move on to the last step.
Add Form to your Website
This step will vary depending on your website platform, basically you will want to paste the code we saved in the first step onto whatever page(s) on your website you want the form to appear. Your web developer can do this easily if you are not comfortable.
Summary
While perfectly “functional”, there are some drawbacks to this method. Mainly the ability to style the form on your website is limited. You can change the Theme, but that’s about it. Also, there is no Spam protection. On the upside, once you paste the form code in your website, you don’t have to go back to your web developer if you make changes to the form. You can add/remove fields, change the Theme and it will all appear on your website without any additional steps.
If you have any questions feel free to post them in the Free Support Forum.
If you need a more advanced solution, contact Forceworks.
