Can I create a form that pulls fields from other forms?

[abourdon]

Good morning,

Here's a question for the community. Our company offers several product lines. Each has its own dedicated quote request form, but we also have a generic "Get a Quote" form in the website header. We decided to keep it for user experience reasons, as it's easy to find for those who aren't paying attention, or aren't technically savvy.

The only down side to doing this is that the quote requests we get via that generic form can't easily be tagged by product line, so we can't categorize them correctly.

Logically, there are a couple of ways to deal with this:

1. Do nothing. The total # of "generic" quote requests is about 5-7% of the total. We've been dealing with it, although it means we have to manually review all the submissions when we do performance reporting.

2. Get rid of the generic form option entirely. My fear is that this would be a hurdle that drives away that 5-7% of quotes we've been getting via the "generic quote" form.

3. Figure out a way to enhance the generic form so that it starts out with just a radio button series with each of the main product categories. When someone clicks on their desired category, it either renders all the data from one of my specific quote forms, or it provides links directly to those other pages. The former would be ideal, but the latter is OK if it's substantially simpler to implement.

For reference, my "generic" quote form is at https://masy.com/index.php/request-a-quote/, and one of my product specific quote forms is at https://masy.com/index.php/request-a-quote-for-biostorage-services/

Any tips and tricks on this would be greatly appreciated. I didn't find anything in the forums here, but I may not be using the right language to describe it (not sure).

[MFrankJohnson]

Your explanation is fine. However, why not just have that generic 'get-a-quote' button take the visitor to a 'What Kind Of Quote Do You Need?' PAGE that has links (or buttons) to your EXISTING quotes pages?

This keeps ALL quote requests properly identified, and only those clicking the generic button are penalized with the extra step. Depending on the volume of quotes, this may suffice.

Those forms are quite comprehensive, so ... a JavaScript solution that triggered showing a specific form based on the visitors initial selection would probably bog down page load by having to pre-load multiple forms first. Just a thought.

[abourdon]

@MFrankJohnson, we had a solution like you described once upon a time. We moved away from that model because we wanted to reduce the number of steps it took for customers to get a quote. Overall, it has improved things, as there are more quotes coming in, and with fewer errors.

However, there are still 5% or so that go to the wrong place. Is 5% good, or bad, based on other peoples' experiences? 

If 5% is worth improving on, would I be correct in my understanding that HS forms don't currently allow you to create forms that can simply call an entire 2nd form based on user interaction?

In a perfect world, I'd love to be able to do something like this:

Select the product you'd like a quote for: (radio button)

*Calibration

*Validation

*Biostorage

*Etc

{Form then pulls up all the fields for the appropriate quote form}

If this can be done, it would be very powerful, as well as fairly quick and easy to implement. "Resusable/callable" forms would be awesome. It would like going from traditional Wordpress elements to reusable Gutenberg blocks in terms of added value on the developer side.

If doing so isn't possible, or it's a major project to do, I'll either go with Frank Johnson's idea, or just leave things as they are. 

[MFrankJohnson]

>>"...HS forms don't currently allow you to create forms that can simply call an entire 2nd form based on user interaction?"

Yes and no. There are custom modules in the HubSpot Marketplace that add multi-form functionality. However, these modules are strictly for implementation on HubSpot pages.
- see Multi-Step Form Slider module by @Stephanie-OG 

>>"If this can be done, it would be very powerful, as well as fairly quick and easy to implement. "Resusable/callable" forms would be awesome. It would like going from traditional Wordpress elements to reusable Gutenberg blocks in terms of added value on the developer side."

Since you guys are using WordPress (WP), have you considered exploring Gravity Forms (GF) to solve your use case? GF is a very powerful WP forms engine that natively allows for multiple field dependencies AND multiple layers of field dependencies -- i.e., field dependencies for fields that depend on other fields. GF has a strong reputation for tight, responsive code, AND they're a leading HubSpot integration partner.

[abourdon]

That's an idea I might look into as well, good thinking. I'm using GF with Mailchimp and SFDC on another site and it works OK. I'll do some research on how well it integrates with HS.

[derekcavaliero · Accepted solution]

If you have separate pages for these dedicated quote forms, you could also make the "generic" form where the user selects the product via radio buttons, redirect dynamically to the dedicated quote form URL and use the generic form as just an "entry" point to direct them to the proper location.

Doing this would require using the onFormSubmit() callback and dynamically redirecting the user by setting the window.location.href global depending on the users selection to the radio input.

Only downside here is that it requires a redirect, and you could do this same thing via just having different text-links on the page instead of routing it through a web-form (since no other fields would be captured it is kind of pointless).

All that being said, gluing multiple forms together to create an experience like this is "possible" but it requires some heavy customization.