It keeps amazing me how little one knows about the Sitecore Platform. To me a key success factor in driving the ROI of your Sitecore Platform is knowing its capabilities inside out. The more you know, the more creative solutions and applications you can come up with to help and engage with your visitors and customers. The more capabilities you use to tailor the customer journey, the better you engage and thus the better your ROI will be.
My goal is to help Sitecore customers achieve more with the platform and in a series of articles I will list examples of how you can use the platform. I hope to inspire you to (and boy do I hate the following words) think outside the box.
So here we go. Let’s start by looking at some ways to use Sitecore Forms, especially in combination with other powerful Sitecore tools.
Examples of using Sitecore Forms
Call me back or contact form
This is the most straight forward application of course. Just a simple contact form that asks for a name, email address and a phone number. Or just two fields for a name and phone number so one could ask to get called by phone.
Survey/questionnaire
Another example of how to use Sitecore Forms is to create a survey/questionnaire. With the default form fields you can create all kinds of questions going from open questions to ratings, choices, etc. And by using the conditions (if the answer is x then do y) you can create a little more intelligence to your questionnaire.
Sign up/registration
With the OOTB fields like email address and password fields (both with confirmation fields and validation) it becomes easier to create sign up forms for visitors. You could use this in a very simple setup where you collect sign ups in the database and create users manually. More beautiful is a custom save action that takes care of this automatically.
Your own usabilla (page,site feedback)
Personally I love this one. We all know the little vertical feedback buttons you see on many websites. Often these come from tools like usabilla to collect feedback for a specific page or the whole site. Now the way these tools work is not something you re-create with Sitecore forms but a more simple version of it is pretty easy. This will help you collect feedback for a specific page or the whole site without third party plugins and addition costs!
A more detailed blog about how I created this one will follow shortly.
Find information wizard
Another great way to use Sitecore forms is a help wizard. A simple multi-step form that asks a few questions and redirects the user to the right page or section on the site.
Download the examples
To help you play and experiment with the examples I showed you, a free download is available. It is a Sitecore install package that can be installed with the Sitecore Package Installer and will install all the five example forms in your Forms folder.
Note that it can be necessary to rebuild the master index in order to show all the forms.