Unique ID: A little field that saves you a lot of hassle

Unique ID: A little field that saves you a lot of hassle

If you go to the Zoho Forms builder and look under Advanced Fields, you'll find this field called the Unique ID. The Unique ID field is one of the most under-utilized features in Forms and one with a lot of hidden
potential; literally. 

It's a field that remains hidden when a user fills out the form, but you can see it while viewing the form submission. How is this helpful, you ask? Ever tried to find a needle in a needle stack? When you have a bunch of orders or bookings and a customer has a query about their particular order or booking, that's when Unique ID comes in handy. When you add the Unique ID field, it creates a number for each form that helps identify individual submissions.

Let's look at a working example of how we can apply this field to make our forms more efficient. 

Take a doctor's appointment form. To make booking appointments easier, we can add the Unique ID field. This adds a unique number to each form submission. You can even specify a prefix or suffix to be added to each ID, for example, a prefix of PI for Patient ID.

Now every single appointment form has a unique number associated with it. Let's take this a step further and send it to the patient who made the booking, so when they arrive at the clinic, they just need to mention their Patient ID and take a seat. To do this, go to Form Rules, under the Rules tab, and click Create Form Rule. Specify a rule for the condition, If 'Name' 'Is Not Empty', then 'Send Email.' Click on the email field and configure the email in the pop-up that appears, like so:

 

To send this mail to the patient, in the 'To' address field, select the required email address field from the Choose Email Field dropdown. This sends the email to the address filled in your form's Email ID field. Personalize the message by including responses to form fields by choosing the required field from the Choose Field dropdown.

For example, you can choose 'Name - First' and 'Name - Last' from the 'Choose Field' dropdown to include the patient's name in the message. Similarly, you can send their Patient ID by including the Unique ID field in the message. Now, the patient can keep a note of this ID on the day of the appointment and for booking follow-up appointments. 

Thus, keeping track of bookings becomes easier with the Unique ID field. Go on and use it in your forms and tell us if it makes your life easier. 

Best
Anugraha 
Zoho Forms



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