Routing forms are a powerful tool for optimizing your meeting booking process. They allow you to:
Qualify leads: Ask screening questions to ensure that only qualified leads book meetings with you and your team.
Manage workflow: route users to specific meeting types based on their screening answers.
Distribute leads fairly: Route leads to the right team member based on their skills, expertise, or availability.
Blacklist specific emails: Implement email blacklisting: Redirect designated users to alternative pages rather than your booking page.
This article explores the following topics in detail:
Watch our quick video on how to set up routing forms or scroll down to find some more written information! π₯ β¬οΈ
How to create a routing form?
Simply go to "Routing forms" and click on "New form". To get started, Demodesk offers you some routing form templates. You can either start with one of those and modify them according to your needs or start from scratch.
Demodesk provides you with some default Meeting types and custom tokens you can use for your routing form. However, to have the best Demodesk experience, we advise you to create your own Meeting types and custom tokens.
Meeting types are one of the destinations you can route your leads to (see more information further below). With Meeting types you can define the kind of meetings that are relevant for your business. Additionally, you can control which team or persons are part of the defined Meeting types. Make sure to enable the scheduling page of your Meeting types:
For the qualifying questions and the rules you define within your routing forms (see more information further below), you might want to define your own custom tokens. The tokens you set up appear as options within the qualifying questions section and the routing rules.
Build your form
Start building your form by asking your website visitor some general questions, e.g. their name, company, mail address, or phone number.
Now continue specifying your qualifying questions. Qualifying questions can e.g. help you to make sure only qualified leads can book meetings with your team. Select here the custom tokens that should appear as options within the form that your website visitors fill out.
Please note that all qualifying questions are obligatory. If you want to set up optional questions, you can do that in the scheduling page section of the respective meeting type.
You can manage the tokens from the Edit qualifying question modal. Just click on "Manage" and then do the changes that need to be done:
Routing rules
Route settings
Define here if you want Demodesk to check your CRM for a matching account and route your lead to the respective owner. Read more about this functionality here.
You can also decide if you rather want to optimize for a fair or a fast lead distribution. To assign team members an equal number of inbound leads, choose "Fair distribution". If you select "Fast distribution", Demodesk will show the available time slots of all team members of the respective Meeting type. Read more about this setting here.
Rules
In this area, you can specify the rules according to which your leads should be routed. Just choose the tokens from the questions you defined above on the left, select the respective answer(s) and then define the destination for this set of rules.
You can add several conditions within one rule. For these conditions you can define if all of them should be met (= AND connected) or if any of them should be met (=OR connected). If you choose a multi-select token and select several options within one condition, those are always OR-connected.
Here is an example:
The rule says: If the department size of the lead is 5-10 OR 11-25 OR their mail address contains "gmail" (any of the conditions is fulfilled) then route to the Demodesk free trial website.
Here is another example:
The rule says: If the department size of the lead is bigger than 80 AND the territory is Europe (both conditions are fulfilled), they should be routed to the Meeting type "[Sales] Discovery & Product Overview - 60 Mins, EN".
With numbers, you can establish conditions such as "Equal to," "Greater than," "Greater than or equal to," "Less than," or "Less than or equal to" with the token, as illustrated below:
Please note that the rules are prioritized according to their order. So make sure that your most important rule is the first one.
The destination can either be a Meeting type (i.e. its booking page) or a Website. If you want prospects to directly book a meeting, we recommend routing to a Meeting type. If they are not qualified for a meeting, you can route them to a registration page of a webinar, or to a free trial.
Last but not least, you need to define a fallback destination. The more complex your routing form is, the easier it is to forget to cover all possible combinations within the routing rules. The fallback destination basically makes your form fail-safe. You can also use it to shorten your routing form rule set.
If you click now on "Save and preview":
You can either copy the link to your routing form or add the form to your webpage:
You can also click through a preview to see what your form feels like for your website visitors.
The iFrame container width should be >= 577px
to have the desktop view- any smaller would have it displayed as mobile view.
β οΈ Please note: In case a meeting was routed to a person who is not bookable, we'll direct the meeting to team members of the same meeting type who can be booked and apply the respective routing rules.
There are different reasons why a teammate is not bookable, e.g. their permission is not set to "bookable" or they do not have a healthy calendar connection.
Blacklisting
You can also leverage routing forms to implement another feature: blacklisting specific emails. This can be achieved by prompting users to provide their email addresses and then directing emails belonging to particular groups (i.e containing specific text) through a predefined rule to, for example, your website or a designated page that informs them that they do not meet the criteria, as illustrated below:
Avoid personal emails
If you want to ensure customers only use business emails then you can also achieve that with routing rules. Simply take your routing link and add this query parameter to it. This will reload the routing form for the booker with a hint in the email field that they should use a business email.
?customer_email=Please%20provide%20a%20business%20email.
Prefilling routing questions
It is possible to prefill the answers to the routing questions by adding URL parameters to the routing link.
How does it work?
Each routing question is connected to a token. When you add a URL parameter with a token slug and the intended value, the answers will automatically be added as answers to the respective routing questions.
Simply add a "?" to the link followed by the token slug, "=", and the intended value. You can refill as many booking questions as you want, just separate them with a " & ".
routing link + "?" + token slug + "=" + value + "&" + token slug + "=" + value ...
You can find the token slugs of your tokens here.
Enforce language
Usually, we adopt the browser's language settings to localize the routing form. You can specify a specific languages by adding "&lang=COUNTRYCODE" (e.g. de= German, en= English) at the end of the link.
Hide the routing question
By adding autoRoute=true
to the URL, you can hide the step that involves asking the routing questions. This option is only available if the necessary information is already provided; otherwise, we won't have enough details for routing.
demodesk.com/select/yourcompany/abcedf?autoRoute=true&company_size=5
So for example in the case above the company size is pre-filled so this step would not be shown.
β‘ Pro Tip: Are you looking to give your customers the freedom to select their preferred meeting host or the specific type of meeting they'd like to book? If so, routing forms are the perfect solution for you!
You can let your customers select what type of meeting they want to book with you or your team. Simply create a token with the meeting types as value:
Then, link the token accordingly in the routing form as part of the question and set up rules to let your customers choose.
You can use this link on your website or in your emails. If you want to learn more about tokens, read this article.
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Please note that you can apply a similar strategy to allow your customers to ultimately choose the hosts they prefer to meet with. This involves routing to the booking links of your team members, each with their unique token set within the booking link as a designated route.