Tip #2: Prefill forms automatically with existing Zoho CRM data

Tip #2: Prefill forms automatically with existing Zoho CRM data

How to automatically prefill a form with existing Zoho CRM data?

Prefilled forms can be useful when you want your prospects to view and confirm their data, and in a wide range of other situations. In Zoho Forms, we prefill the fields with the values from Zoho CRM using the Zoho CRM field.



What is a Zoho CRM field?

A Zoho CRM field acts as a two-way communication channel, by sending data to Zoho CRM from forms and fetching information from CRM into Forms. The field will look up data from your CRM account to prefill the form.

This field accesses the CRM record using a unique key to identify which record you are searching for. The records can be identified by their last name, company, or any other unique field.

Setting up the integration

First you need to add the Zoho CRM field to your form. In the setup configuration, determine the following:
  1. Which field to use to identify the CRM record. For example, the Last Name of the record.
  2. Which details should be prefilled in the form. In the example below, the record's First Name , Email, and Phone are set to be prefilled. 



Notes on using Zoho CRM fields  
  • The Zoho CRM field will not work for embedded forms, or if forms are shared via public link(URL). It can only be used when the form is shared privately (within the organization). 
  • The person updating the data must be a user of both Zoho Form and Zoho CRM and have View/Edit access to records in CRM. 
Send out prefilled forms to your leads/contacts

If you need to share forms with people outside the organization and want the forms to be prefilled with the data from your CRM records, you can send the link to the form as an email in Zoho CRM. This allows a prefilled form to reach the end respondent, with a disabled Zoho CRM field. This keeps the data secure, because the disabled field will not reveal any information from other records.

How prefilling works?

The fields in the form are not populated when the form reaches the respondent. They will need search for a particular CRM record using a unique key, in this example, it is Last Name (as configured above). When the record is found, the mapped values in the Zoho CRM field setup will be autofilled into the form fields.

As shown in the example below, the First Name, Phone and the Email fields are automatically populated with data from the CRM record. The user can further modify the autofilled values, and also fill out the remaining form fields.



Now that you know how to prefill forms, we will discuss how this can be used to update or add data in the upcoming series.



Stay tuned!
Prasana.


If you have any questions or feedback to share, feel free to comment below or drop us an email at   support@zohoforms.com. 


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