Forms: the secret to a successful business

What’s your business’s superpower? Is it incredible customer support? An amazing product with an unbeatable UX? The smoothest sales journey? 

Here’s a trade secret: The key ingredient in building each of these strengths is asking your customers what they want and need. 

It’s true. The small-but-mighty form is your secret serum to unlock an entire multiverse of knowledge about your customers: what they love and hate, what they want to see more of, and who they are. 

You can use forms (as surveys, quizzes, polls, and more) to help you gather the information you need for better personalization and products. Plus, with third-party data in jeopardy and a cookieless future looming ever larger, gathering your own data is critical.

But the potential of forms is even more multifaceted than you think. With outside-the-box thinking and data-driven strategies, we see our customers using them to supercharge customer engagement in every part of their businesses. 

From increasing close rates to gathering product feedback (and even prototyping), learn how three companies use forms and surveys to save the day—and how you can, too.

Calm: Using forms to craft a customer-centric experience

For an app focused on stress relief, user experience is central. 

The team behind Calm knows that the key to understanding customers is asking them about that experience: how they use the app and what Calm could do better. These answers give the team what they need to improve UX.

Chase Clark, Senior UX Researcher at Calm, knew surveys were the way to efficiently (and effectively) gather this information. But the team wanted to ensure a delightful survey experience; the last thing they want is to put more stress on customers when they’re providing valuable app feedback. 

For a people-friendly experience when gathering input, Calm partnered with Typeform.

1. Gathering user experience feedback

Calm sends surveys to a select group of app users. The forms ask if the customer uses the app to get better sleep, reduce anxiety, improve focus, improve themselves, or for another reason. 

This initial answer affects the rest of the respondent’s path through the survey. That way, the results paint a clear picture of UX based on the user’s goals, meaning more precise feedback all around. 

From there, Calm asks users for their opinion of the app experience—good, bad, or indifferent—to understand how they can improve. These improvements include refining and updating existing features and building new ones. 

2. Testing new ideas

With typeforms, Calm is also able to have better conversations with customers that then help them innovate as a business. They use these surveys to gauge user interest in ideas for the app before putting valuable engineering time and resources behind them. 

When Calm users respond positively to a potential feature, that’s a green flag to put engineers on the project. If respondents aren’t interested, the team might shelve the idea. 

“We need to know that we’re building the right things for real problems and just keeping a pulse on what has changed,” Clark says.

Plus, with numerous question types in Typeform, Calm can gather quantitative and qualitative data for a complete picture of user feedback. Forms let the Calm team make better, more customer-focused decisions about their app, backed by real-life experiences and user input.

Agexa: Using forms to strengthen the sales funnel

Agexa, a digital marketing agency, helps build better marketing funnels for consultants, so they can grow their audiences, scale their businesses, and maximize revenue. Data lets them deliver results at every stage of the process from qualifying leads to scaling consultancies to creating product offerings to retain customers. The challenge for Agexa was finding a better way to ask for this data—and Typeform offered a customizable solution.

1. Understanding awareness for better marketing

When onboarding a new consultant, Agexa’s goal is to assess the current state of the target audience. Are the ideal clients actively searching for a consultant’s services, or does Agexa need to help them raise awareness?

They send surveys to clients who’ve already engaged with consultants, asking about other influencers they follow in the niche or other services they’ve purchased. Responses to these questions tell the Agexa team if they need awareness-building tactics like Facebook or YouTube ads. 

If marketing efforts need to reach leads who are already solution-aware, tactics like Google Ads—which intercept the search process—are best. This data meets another need, too: It sheds light on what people are looking for, helping consultants shape their product offerings and provide what their audience wants.

With the data to inform consultants about their existing audience, Agexa can also help them invest their resources to expand their audience.

2. Qualifying and scoring leads

Survey data also helps Agexa streamline consultants’ sales funnels. 

The team creates forms designed to redirect leads by asking questions relevant to service or product offerings. These questions help Agexa qualify (or disqualify) leads and send them down the best path for their needs. 

For example, one form asked about credit scores with two resulting paths. A score above 650 pointed the lead to the consultant’s primary offering. A sub-650 score, which would disqualify them for the main offering, moved them down a path catered to helping them build personal credit.

These responses from leads made a clear distinction between qualified and unqualified leads. The result? 

“Utilizing Typeform to help with the sales funnel has increased our close percentage from 10% to 18% pretty much overnight since 50% of our prior leads were unqualified,” Sam Queen, Publishing Partner at Agexa, says.

Typeform’s scoring capabilities further strengthened lead qualification. Certain questions and multiple-choice answers are worth more points, painting a fuller picture of how qualified a lead may be. The sales process then runs more smoothly—consultants know which questions to ask and actions to take for each lead.

3. Customizing the product offering

For a product as individualized as consulting, personalization is key. Because data is essential for personalizing your offerings, forms can massively improve the intake process for Agexa’s consultants. 

When clients fill out an intake form through Typeform, their answers are mapped through a Zapier workflow. These responses correspond to custom variables, which the Agexa team uses to build an individualized plan to fit their unique situation and needs. Just one form helped them craft an entire customer journey. 

Best of all, this process is faster and simpler than ever before. 

“We were able to … create fully custom [plans] for our customers in a matter of seconds versus the 10 minutes it took us to manually create them prior. At our peak, we were onboarding 40 customers a day, so that’s a lot of time saved,” Queen says.

Modulo: Using forms to launch a minimum viable product

We’ve seen how gathering data with forms is essential for marketing tactics, sales processes, and customer experience. But forms can also do so much more—even launch a company.

Take Modulo’s Manisha Snoyer, who had a vision for a tool that would help homeschooling parents find the right curriculums for their kids. With so many resources available, she saw an opportunity to help parents who were scrambling to navigate it all.

Investors didn’t see the potential of her idea, but Snoyer knew it had legs. She realized she could build a prototype of the app using Typeform. Custom forms allowed her to bootstrap the company, which has become an entire ecosystem for learning from home. 

Here’s how it happened.

1. Building the prototype

Having used Typeform previously, Snoyer was familiar with its features. 

After deciding to use Typeform for the minimum viable product (MVP), she got to work, using logic jumps to guide users through a curriculum selection journey. Based on their answers, the form would send users down the path that would bring them closer to their child’s needs.

Once finished, the prototype was ready for testing right away, and test markets from Facebook and Reddit brought Modulo its first users.

2. Collecting users’ thoughts

As grassroots marketing and word of mouth fueled the company’s growth, Snoyer wanted to keep improving the app. 

“What's really great about Typeform is that you can ask for feedback in the form itself,” says Snoyer.  

She used users’ opinions to improve the app experience, which led to better conversations with parents about other improvements and additions—a win-win for everyone.

3. Making quick changes

App changes can take weeks or months to complete, even with the efforts of an entire development team. Not so with Modulo’s MVP. 

With full control over the prototype and a user-friendly interface, Snoyer herself was able to adjust content and logic flows and add new features in real time. This shrank the pipeline from user feedback to production significantly. As soon as someone sent in their thoughts, Snoyer could implement changes in hours.

Plus, as a small-but-mighty team, she didn’t have to pay the costly overhead of hiring an entire crew of engineers.

How will you tap into Typeform’s potential?

Gathering data is essential for the success of each part of your business. 

Of course, forms help you collect the information you need. But they also show your customers you care and help you build a stronger relationship with them. 

When you see forms as your brand’s secret weapon and think outside the box to use them in many ways, there’s no limit to how they can transform your business.