Scheduling appointments efficiently is critical for businesses and organizations seeking to provide good customer service. However, handling inbound leads and inquiries can become complex quickly. Routing each contact to the right person or team is crucial to deliver prompt responses and convert more leads into customers. This is where tools like Calendly routing forms come in – they automate the process of distributing appointments and meeting requests to the appropriate agents or departments.
With Calendly routing forms, you can create smart intake forms that capture important details right when someone books time on your calendar. The system then uses this input to instantly route appointments according to rules and logic you configure. This eliminates bottlenecks from manual triage while ensuring each inquiry gets to the right expert who can address the prospect’s needs.
While Calendly has been a popular routing forms solution, emerging tools like Zeeg provide similar functionality with additional flexibility and integration capabilities. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore what Calendly routing forms are, why they’re valuable, and how they work to streamline scheduling workflows. We’ll also see how Zeeg and other alternatives stack up as we compare the pros and cons of Calendly versus other routing form software on the market. Whether you already use Calendly or are evaluating intake and appointment scheduling solutions, you’ll learn useful strategies in this article for maximizing efficiency gains through intelligent lead routing tools.
What are Calendly routing forms?
Calendly routing forms are intake forms that are paired with the Calendly scheduling platform in order to automatically distribute appointments to the right people or teams. With Calendly routing forms, when someone goes to book a meeting or appointment on your calendar, they first fill out questions that capture important context about their request.
For example, you may want to know what topics they need to discuss, their role and seniority, what region or product line they have questions about, and more. These intake questions help qualify leads and inquiries so you can efficiently match them to the best resource for their needs when they want to meet.
Once someone completes the routing form questions, Calendly’s rules engine kicks in behind the scenes. Appointments get automatically directed to specific calendars, individuals, or departments depending on how you configure the routing rules based on questionnaire responses. This eliminates the manual work of evaluating inquiries and assigning them to the right agents while still providing a seamless scheduling experience for prospects.
How do Calendly routing forms work?
Calendly routing forms provide an automated way to direct inbound leads and appointments to the right people based on pre-configured rules and logic. Here is an overview of how you can set up and leverage intelligent routing with Calendly:
- Build An Intake Form
The first step is creating questions to capture key details about inbound inquiries. Within the Calendly platform, you can build customized forms with various field types like multiple choice, dropdowns, checkboxes and more. Common qualifying questions ask about company size, industry, interests, role, location and so on.
- Set Up Routing Destinations
Next, you connect your Calendly scheduling links to teams or individuals who should receive different types of appointments. For example, smaller accounts may route to junior sales reps while enterprise prospects go to the VP of Sales.
- Configure Routing Rules
This is where the logic comes in to route leads automatically. You set up score ranges or conditional criteria that assigns inquiries to the appropriate destination based on intake form responses. Requests meeting certain conditions are directed to Destination A while others go to Destination B or C based on your configurable rules.
- Form Responses Trigger Automated Routing
Once the intake form and routing rules are set up, the system runs on autopilot. When new prospects fill out the questionnaire and book appointments, Calendly instantly evaluates the rules and sends the meetings or calls to the right calendars and internal teams mapped to those scoring criteria.
Using Zeeg as an alternative routing form solution
Emerging as a leading alternative based in Europe, Zeeg distinguishes itself as an elegant intake and routing solution. It is easy and flexible for business users but also provides an eye-catching experience for prospects and customers filling out forms. With a modern and intuitive interface, Zeeg enables creating smart campaigns for lead generation or automating customer support without the complexity.
Whether you want to embed routing directly on your website, gate content offers behind a quiz, or power virtual event registrations, Zeeg facilitates it all through its drag-and-drop builder. Forms are customizable with various fields from text boxes to multiple choice questions to file uploads and more. No coding or development resources required.
Once built, forms can be plugged in via embed codes, landing pages, or pop-ups then integrated directly with your CRM and marketing systems through Zapier and API connections. This means appointment data flows into your databases while notifications, tasks, workflows are triggered based on submissions.
With support for complex logic using JavaScript rules, the platform scales from basic lead qualifying to advanced use cases. And for mid-market and enterprise teams, Zeeg delivers comparable capabilities to Calendly at almost 50% lower pricing, representing significant cost savings.
Overall, Zeeg brings both aesthetic appeal and technical flexibility lacking in Calendly for intake automation.
Why do I need a Routing Form?
Using intake and routing forms provides several key benefits when managing inbound inquiries and appointments:
- Qualify Leads Faster - Forms standardize lead qualification at the very start of engagement by capturing key details like industry, role, business size and interests. This enables instantly identifying the most promising opportunities to prioritize.
- Route More Accurately - With the ability to configure routing rules and logic, forms distribute high quality leads to the right teams and individuals to respond based on expertise, capacity and other criteria.
- Reduce Bottlenecks - Automated scoring and routing eliminates manual evaluations and decisions around lead assignment. This prevents delays and bottlenecks.
- Improve Data Quality - Structuring incoming data into forms minimizes errors, inconsistencies and missing information that happen with free-form inquiries. Over time this results in cleaner lead records.
- Streamline Workflows - The instant hand-off via automated routing connects form submissions to downstream processes like notifications, follow-ups and workflows for continued efficiency gains.
In essence, intake and routing forms act as a command center to ingest, qualify, and instantly channel inbound interest to accelerate revenue generation and customer success.
How do Routing Forms work?
The mechanics behind intelligent routing forms come down to 3 key steps:
- Building out the form - This starts with the upfront questionnaire that captures details like interests, role, industry and more from inbound leads. Custom form fields enable qualifying criteria.
- Mapping responses to routing - Next, the questionnaire answers get mapped to the appropriate resources. For example, marketing inquiries get routed to the marketing team while enterprise prospects go to sales VPs.
- Automated assignment - Finally, when a prospect completes the form, their answers instantly trigger routing to the associated resource's calendar for follow up.
This sequence allows intake quizzes to direct booking requests without any manual evaluation or costly delays coordinating across teams. The system runs automatically based on configured rules mapping responses to destinations.
How to create a Routing Form in Calendly
Creating an automated intake and routing form within Calendly takes a few key steps:
1. Build Out the Intake Form
Start by constructing a lead qualifying questionnaire using Calendly’s drag-and-drop form builder. Add questions in formats like multiple choice, dropdowns, checkboxes, and more with customized options to capture relevant lead details. Common examples include company size, role, location, interests, or customer segment.
2. Set Up Screening Routes
Next, configure screening logics to automatically redirect visitors who don’t meet certain disqualifying criteria. For example, screen out small businesses by routing their submissions to a custom message or external URL rather than a booking link. Tailor messaging to provide next steps or alternative options.
3. Map Qualified Leads to Booking Routes
Then create booking logics to map submissions that meet qualifying criteria to appropriate scheduling links, teams, or external destinations you wish to direct promising leads towards for further engagement.
4. Build a Fallback Route
In addition, set up a default fallback route to handle form submissions that don’t match any previous screening or booking routing rules. This ensures you have a path to redirect all inbound interested parties.
5. Validate Routing with Test Submissions
Before finalizing and distributing your Calendly routing form, publish it then thoroughly test sample submissions to validate accuracy of routing outcomes. Refine any inconsistent logic until satisfied.
Once configured properly following these key steps, your automated Calendly form will intake lead details and instantly deliver booking inquiries to appropriate handling resources based on responses.
Managing and Analyzing Routing Form Responses in Calendly
Once your routing form is published and capturing submissions, Calendly provides insights into responses for ongoing optimization. Within the platform you can:
- View submission details - Check individual form response history along with the associated routing destination or outcome for each entry. Filter and sort to analyze response patterns.
- Export submission data - Download full response data in CSV format for additional analysis and integration with other systems like CRMs.
- Monitor performance - Track metrics like form submission volumes, booking rates, and automated routing accuracy over time to fine tune form questions and routing logic.
- Adjust routing rules - Edit existing screening/booking routing criteria or fallback logic based on learnings from response patterns.
- Update form questions - Add, edit or remove intake questions and answer options based on which provide the most relevant signals.
With these capabilities, Calendly equips admins to continually evolve their automated routing approach using response insights to improve lead qualification and assignment accuracy. Users can refine forms responsively through easy configuration changes.
Exporting Calendly Routing Form Data
To enable further analysis or integration of routing form submissions with other systems, Calendly allows exporting complete response data in CSV format.
Admins can download full details of all form entries, including:
- Timestamps
- Questions displayed
- Answers selected per response
- Associated routing destination per entry
- Contact details (if collected)
Bringing this data into spreadsheet tools or loading it into databases allows additional reporting capabilities. For example, admins may want to segment analysis by factors not available within Calendly directly.
Common use cases for exported routing form data include:
- Syncing bi-directionally with CRM platforms
- Importing into business intelligence dashboards
- Further statistical analysis using Excel or dedicated tools
- Backup or archiving form submissions externally
- Feeding data into custom lead handling workflows
With easy access to full, raw routing form response data, Calendly provides flexibility for businesses and teams to incorporate insights into other stacks as needed.
Conclusion
Intelligent routing and intake forms have become invaluable for organizations managing high volumes of inbound leads and appointments. Automating the process of capturing qualifying details as well as distributing booking requests delivers immense efficiency gains while providing quality customer experiences.
As discussed, Calendly stands out as a sophisticated platform enabling customizable forms and logic to instantly score leads, segment priorities, and route to appropriate teams for follow up. Configuring tailored workflows allows businesses to scale while ensuring accurate and rapid lead assignment.
And for those seeking an enterprise-ready alternative with more customization and CRM integrations, Zeeg represents a compelling opportunity - especially when cost savings is a consideration. With elegant design and enhanced automation capabilities, it is a routing forms solution worth evaluating further.
No matter the platform, leveraging the power of automated lead routing through intake forms streamlines the top of funnel processes to help businesses convert more prospects ultimately. The ability to instantly channel inbound inquiries based on answers provided solves a universal pain point for high-performance sales and service teams.
FAQs
What are routing forms?
Routing forms are intelligent intake questionnaires that are used to automatically direct inbound leads or appointments to the appropriate sales reps, agents or teams for follow up. Routing forms standardize the capture of key details from leads upfront through custom questions that profile criteria like company size, industry, interests and needs. Based on how visitors respond, the routing form software then instantly assigns the leads to designated individuals or groups using rule-based logic mapping form answers to routing destinations.