Managing Incomplete Form Responses

What is an incomplete response?

An incomplete response is a response that was submitted by the respondent, but for one reason or another, a final step was not completed successfully.

When using FormAssembly.com, there are four different situations where a response will be considered incomplete:

1. With the “Save & Resume” option enabled (which by the way is now optional), the respondent has saved the form, but has not yet come back to finalize it.
2. With the ‘Preview’ option enabled, the respondent has completed the form, but has not yet clicked the ‘confirm’ button on the preview page.
3. With the ‘Captcha’ option enabled, the respondent failed to correctly identify the letters and has not yet resubmitted the form.
4. The respondent submitted a form that did not pass the server-side validation and has not yet resubmitted the form with valid data.

The “incomplete” status can be temporary, since the respondent can still complete the required step to finalize the response. It can also be permanent, if the respondent has abandoned the form.

What can I do with incomplete responses?

The new FormAssembly includes a view to manage incomplete responses. Its purpose is to help you identify and reduce the number of abandoned responses.

It is quite common, for instance, to find a response saved and eventually abandoned because its author couldn’t remember the address or the password to resume the form. To mitigate this problem, we provide a couple of built-in tools to easily send reminders and reset passwords. But first, we added a way for your visitors to contact you when they need assistance.

Provide Assistance

At the bottom of each form there is a link, “Need assistance with this form?“, which leads to a page showing your public contact information. You can enter this information in the “Account” tab, when logged on your FormAssembly.com account. By providing an email address or a phone number, you will ensure that anyone who has difficulty filling out or resuming one of your forms will be able to contact you for assistance.

Send a Reminder

When you have identified a response that was saved by its author and not resumed within a reasonable time-frame, you can easily send a customized reminder in a couple of clicks.

Reset a Password

If one of your respondent has lost his/her password and is asking for your help, you can also send a new password very easily. The email and the new password are automatically generated.

Finalize the Response

You can also finalize the response yourself if you think that the data available is good enough and that the respondent is unlikely to come back.

That’s it for this introduction of one of the new features of FormAssembly.com. Remember, you can try the new version for free. The next post will present the new API, and show how it allows your visitors to go through the several steps of completing a form without leaving your site.