The joys of connecting a Google Form up to the Crmble Power-Up in Trello

[#1]

Even though I write automations all day, every day for my clients I was still just receiving an email notification whenever someone filled out the request for quote form on the BenkoBot website (plumber with the leaky taps anyone?)

The Google Form email notifications really suck, you can't see any information about the form submission without clicking through to a link which not only works terribly on mobile devices but also gives you no way of replying to the enquiry.

Since I use BenkoBoard for my emails, what I would end up doing is copying the card in Trello, copying and pasting the information out of the Google Form response and then emailing the customer.

I finally cracked this morning and decided to write an automation to create Trello cards from Google Form responses and then I remembered ... Crmble already does that!!

After connecting my Google account to Crmble, I was able to add a form and choose where to put leads and how the Google Form fields map to Crmble fields. The only minor hiccup I had was that my form just has a single field for "Your Name", but Crmble has a first and last name field. There was no automated "name splitting" option. Also, I have a question in my form that I'd like to add to the card description, but there is only a one-to-one mapping between form field and card description (and no custom Crmble fields yet) so I had to stick that answer in "Job Title" which I don't currently use:

Not a deal breaker obviously, but nice to have (needless to say I have sent a feature request to the Crmble team about that :)

Now when someone submits the Google form on my site, I get a new card in my Inbox. The name of the person is the title of the card and their response to my "Describe the automation you'd like" is in the card description. This means I can see the critical information from my mobile device even though Crmble is a power-up (and thus the Crmble fields don't show up on mobile).

I can still email the contact directly from the card using the BenkoBoard Crmble integration by simply typing "@to crmble" into a comment on the card, which will work from my mobile since BenkoBoard doesn't run as a powerup but rather, runs as a "bot-style" integration directly with my Trello account:

Better still, now that I've got these contacts going into Crmble rather than just creating an automation to create Trello cards from Google Form responses, I can see all my Google Form leads and their current status in a list view as they move through the enquiry pipeline and have a handy CSV export -- for me, this is the real power of Crmble and why it's better to use than simply creating my own version using Google Apps Script automation + Custom Fields:

Also, if you're not a Google Forms type of person you can connect up your Facebook Lead forms and Typeforms as well which is great because, while Google Forms are free, they don't look all that good ;)

If you haven't checked out Crmble yet, give it a try!

[M Amine]

Very interesting article