ProTip: Arm Field Teams With Custom Actions & Deep Links
Leverage custom actions and deep links to help your team work smarter
With GoFormz, not only can you capture data from a mobile device, but also provide your mobile workforce with information that will help them do their jobs.
Imagine you are a field worker and a new Job Form popped up on your smartphone, pre-filled with the address and contact information for a job. That is handy in and of itself, but this mobile form can come equipped with additional tools to make your life even easier:
You press the “Directions” button, and Google Maps opens up immediately with directions to the job site.
As you get closer to the customer’s location, you press the “Call Customer” within the form, and it dials your contact’s phone number, so that you can conveniently coordinate your arrival.
Once onsite, you press the “Schematic” button to bring up the appropriate schematics for the job in Dropbox (e.g. for an electrician this might be the electrical wiring for the building you will be working).
Once you are done with the job, you realize that a follow-up will be necessary – no problem! The “Launch Follow-up Form” button creates a new Follow-up Form, and automatically pre-fills it with the appropriate data from your Job Form.
Pretty nifty, right? All of the information that you need to complete your job is right at your fingertips, conveniently embedded within the Job Form! This kind of mobile integration is incredibly useful, can save incredible amounts of time, and facilitates efficient task completion by centralizing all the resources you need in one place. The Job Form, in this example, serves as the hub for anything you may require to complete your job successfully.
All of this is made possible by Custom Actions. Custom Actions let you add new options to your form template’s actions menu, as illustrated above with the “Directions” and “Schematics” actions. These actions leverage deep linking technology to carry out actions or bring up contextually relevant resources in other apps on your phone, or within the GoFormz app itself. Form inputs are used to construct the right deep link and therefore bring up the right data within the app being invoked. For instance, the customer’s address in the form is used to bring up Google Maps with the appropriate directions; and the job ID might be used to open an image of the right electrical schematic within the Box app’s folder hierarchy.
Our example describes some of the most common Custom Actions — opening a document from a cloud storage app, calling a phone number, getting directions on a map, launching a new form — but many more actions are available. Any app that supports deep linking, which is most business apps these days, can be opened via a GoFormz Custom Action.
Want to know more? Contact us to learn how to get started with GoFormz Custom Actions, and harness the power of deep linking to empower your mobile workforce.
Looking for more ways to empower your field teams? Check out our guide to getting started with GoFormz Workflows here.
