Web development agencies and consultants work on a task-based basis. To understand more about how these professionals operate, read about the benefits of using agile methodology in web development projects. To give their paying clients the freedom to request new projects and tasks, agencies use project intake forms.
It can be tough for the agencies to handle all the tasks clients want if they don’t have a good way of organizing things. Clients might send their requests through emails, social media, or help desk tickets. But these ways can make things messy, especially if you don’t have a system to keep track of clients and your team doesn’t know who’s handling which task.
Another issue in the client intake process is that sometimes they don’t provide enough relevant information when they make project requests. This means there’s a lot of talking back and forth between you and the clients after initial consultation, which could have been avoided if you had the right info from the start.
To improve client communication, explore effective ways to measure your brand awareness.
Let’s see how to build a highly scalable intake form application and why using these special forms is a smart idea.
For further insights on leveraging digital platforms, consider reading about how to leverage social media PR for your business.
What’s a Project Intake Form?
A new project intake form is a set of special questions or directions that clients need to complete before agencies or freelancers can start working on a project. It is an important part of the client intake process. These intake forms have slots for the contact details and collect information you need and options to upload files, spreadsheets, and pick dates.
The point of the client intake form is to make things easier which is done by asking all the important things.
Learn more about effective client management by checking out our guide on how to build a client intake form.
Why Do You Need a Project Intake Form?
Having a project intake form is important because it makes things go smoother between agencies and their clients. Instead of clients having to guess what basic information an agency needs to do a job, agencies create special intake forms that ask all the right questions.
Understand the importance of these forms in our discussion on the benefits of having a website for your business.
Let’s check out why these intake forms are really useful for agencies and how they work:
1. Keeps Things Consistent
Clients might not know how an agency works on new projects. This can lead to clients not giving all the necessary info, and agencies having to ask for more details. By asking the right questions, the project intake process becomes clear for both the client and the agency.
2. Gives the Right Details
A study found that companies that have effective communication finish about 80% of their client projects on time. Agencies know exactly what they need from clients to get a project done.
3. Automation
Sometimes, you can make things happen without having people to do everything. Imagine a client sending in tasks with different levels of importance. You can have a drop-down menu in the client intake form where they pick “Low,” “Medium,” or “High” priority. Then you can set up the system to give these tasks tags automatically based on their priority level.
Explore the role of automation in digital marketing in digital marketing tools.
4. Save Time
If project requests come from different sources, it’s really hard to keep them organized. But when all the tasks are in one place, like a client portal, it’s much easier. You can see all the projects you need to work on, and filters help you focus on what’s most important.
5. Client Onboarding
Using intake forms makes the client onboarding process a lot smoother and more efficient. They offer a structured way to gather essential project information from clients right from the start. This helps agencies and consultants understand their clients’ needs and preferences accurately, enabling them to tailor their services accordingly.
How to Build a Highly Scalable Intake Form Application?
Before you start making your intake form, think about the projects you’ve done before. Gain insights from our article on how to build website architecture to enhance your project planning. Remember when things got a little confusing or needed lots of back-and-forth emails between you and the potential clients? What caused that? Learning from these past experiences can help you avoid problems in the future.
Also, check if there were projects that went smoothly. Look into why they worked well.
Here are some tips for building a highly scalable intake form application:
1. Putting User Experience (UX) First in Intake Forms
When lots of people visit your website, it’s really important to give them a great experience. If there are any mistakes or confusing things on the website, the visitors might quickly reach out to your customer support team for help. But sometimes, there might be so many questions that the support team can’t answer all of them right away.
For more on handling website traffic, read about the traffic your website can handle.
To prevent this, web designers should spend a lot of time making sure everything looks and works perfectly. Delve into web design best practices to enhance user experience on your websites. They should pay attention to every little detail, like the words on the screen and the places where you type things to make the process of filling out intake forms as easy as possible. The links and buttons you click on should be clear and easy to understand.
2. Handling High Traffic Surge Architecture
If lots of people visit a website all at once the website has to be super strong to handle all those people. You should create websites on Hosts that can deal with millions of people using them at the same time. When people fill out intake forms on the website at the same time, it should save all the basic client information without causing problems.
Websites only get busy during certain times. You can make the website’s servers and other important parts smaller when they’re not needed. This helps us save money.
3. Making Forms for Your Services
Service Intake forms are super helpful, especially when you make one for each type of service you offer. For example, if you’re a service provider for graphics that can do many things. Even if you have a service where existing clients can ask for anything, you still need to make service intake forms that let them ask for specific tasks like creating ads, banners, podcast covers, and more. The intake forms can change based on what they want.
4. Making It Easy for New Clients
Keep your client intake form simple and short for the onboarding process to take all the information you need. The “KISS” rule is perfect for intake forms – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Think about what you absolutely need to know for the project intake process and get it done and only ask for that.
5. Choose the Right Questions For Client Intake Process
The intake forms should have different fields you can use. There should be fields for specific things, like passwords for a client portal or uploading files. For example, if you’re a content writing agency, you might like using Google forms with spreadsheet-style input. Podcast editing agencies could use a file upload field for audio and video files.
6. Make Things Automated
You might be thinking about how to make the intake forms process automatic. After someone buys a service, they should get directed to fill out the client intake form they need. They’ll also get reminders if they forget. You can also set things up so that data collection from the intake forms goes to your CRM system. This helps you understand what clients are interested in and might want more of.
7. Test It Out
Once you have a web design for the service intake form, ask real people to test it out. This helps you see if the service intake form is easy for people to use or if they get confused. If people have trouble using the service intake form, listen to their feedback and make changes to improve it.
8. Responsiveness
Don’t just stop at how the client intake form looks on a computer screen. Check to see if it works well on different devices, like mobile phones and tablets. A lot of people use their phones to visit websites, so make sure the service intake form works smoothly on different types of phones.
Learn about creating responsive designs in our piece on what is responsive design.
9. Compatible With Different Browsers
Sometimes, when people use old internet browsers, there can be problems with the website. These problems might stop people from sending in client intake forms. To avoid this, test the online intake form on different internet browsers to make sure it works well no matter what browser you’re using.
Conclusion
Intake forms are important for all sorts of companies to handle customer new project requests. If they don’t have these strong intake forms, they might still have to use the old way of sending important papers through email. But doing that takes a lot of time and money for businesses. It’s time to start using new kinds of intake forms on the internet for business processes. This will make things easier for customers and help businesses work better.
