Leads from your website

The work request form is a public page you can link or embed so a customer can ask for work without ringing you. It lives at /r/your-address under an address you choose, wears your colours, and works on any phone — with scripting off, the browser posts the form the plain old way, so nobody is turned away by their browser. It reads in English or Spanish, following the visitor's browser language, with a switch on the page.

Every request it accepts becomes its own order. Within about a minute the request is a customer — the one you already have, when the phone or email matches — the car when they named it, and an estimate with their words on it, waiting at the top of your Workflow board until somebody takes it. A stranger on the internet can ask; deciding who works it, and whether to work it at all, is still your people's.

Publishing it

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   Step 1: Choose an address

   In Settings › Work request form, type an Address — lower-case letters, numbers and hyphens. Changing the address later kills every old link, which is deliberate: it is the one lever you have if somebody starts spamming the form.

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   Step 2: Turn it on

   Tick Publish it and press Save form. Until it is on, the page answers not found — to everybody, including anybody guessing addresses.

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   Step 3: Hand it out

   The screen has two panels: Edit is everything you decide, and Share is how people reach it. Share carries The link your customers will use, Open your form to see exactly what a customer sees, and the snippet under Put it on your website that drops the same page inside your own site. Nothing on Share is a setting — there is nothing there to save, and switching panels never loses an edit.

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   Step 4: Put the link where customers are

   Your website, your Google listing, the bottom of an invoice. The link can carry ?source=google so each request says where it came from.

What you decide about it

Who it is for

Individuals, Fleets, or Both. A fleets-only form always requires a company name; on Both, the company question appears only when the person says they are a business.

How it looks

A title, an optional line above the form, and background and button colours from a short list. Every pair on that list has been checked for contrast in both themes, so there is no combination that leaves your customer squinting.

What it shows about you

Logo, phone, email and address come off your invoice template, so you keep them in one place. Website and certifications are the two the form adds.

What you ask for

Phone, email, company, vehicle and message can each be Required or Optional. First and last name are always required, and so is at least one of phone or email — a request nobody can answer sits in your queue looking like work, so the database refuses it underneath.

If you do not want to decide

Press Use the recommended set and the switches move to what most shops end up choosing: the car, the finer vehicle details, a photo and a preferred day, all Optional. Nothing is saved by pressing it — the preview beside you changes and you are left looking at it, so you can undo it with Discard changes or press Save form when it reads right.

What to say above the box

Caption puts one line of your own above the what-do-you-need box — “tell us the noise and when it happens”, or what you do not work on. It is the one sentence on the form that changes the answers you get rather than the impression you make. Leave it empty and the form reads exactly as it does today.

Vehicle lookup

Off unless you turn it on. With it on, the car is asked for in one box — Enter License Plate, VIN, or Year/Make/Model — with Enter Vehicle Manually beside it for anybody who would rather type. A plate lookup is a paid call to an outside service and this page is open to the internet, so there is a limit per hour behind it; a visitor pressing the search several times can never use up the one request they came to send, because the two are counted separately. Under the box, Show license plate results for names the state — set the one your customers usually come from under State your plates usually come from on this same card. If no plate provider is connected, no lookup button is drawn at all and the form says so in one plain sentence. The fields are always there either way, and they are what a visitor with scripting off sees and sends.

On the Workflow board

New requests sit in a Work requests strip above the lanes, with a count in its heading: who sent it, their car, what they asked for in one line, how long ago it arrived, and how many photos came with it. The strip is only there while something is waiting, and Hide requests folds it to its heading for you alone. Each card has three doors. Take puts your name on the order and it moves into Estimates like any other. Decline turns it away with one of the two verdicts the queue uses — Closed, or Junk — and the estimate is closed; the customer stays on your books. Open is the order itself, with their photos already attached.

A request that named the year, make and model opens as a repair order on that car. One that only described the car in a sentence opens as a quote, because a repair order needs a car and the software will not guess one from a sentence — ask for the year, make and model on your form if you want every request on the board as a repair order.

Every work request makes its own order

The switch in Settings › Work request form, on unless you turn it off. Off, every request waits in the queue below for a person to convert, as it always did.

Probably junk stays out

A request scored as probably junk never becomes an order. It waits in the queue, unjudged, for a person to decide.

Twenty an hour

At most twenty requests become orders in any hour at one shop. Past that, the rest wait in the queue, so a flood cannot fill your board.

Fresh requests only

A request somebody here has already started working is never taken out of their hands, and one older than half an hour is left for a person.

Where a request lands

Every submission is also listed in Customers › Work requests as a request with a status: New, Working, Converted, Junk or Closed. If the phone number matches somebody already on your books, the row says so — as a guess you can disagree with, not a link the form made for you. The submitter is never told whether they matched; a public form that answered differently for known names would be a way to look your customer list up from outside.

A request that did not become an order — the switch is off, it looked like junk, or it arrived past the hour's twenty — waits there for a person. Converting it is one press — Make a customer, or Add to the matched record — and the row beneath the button says exactly what the press will do before you press it. A conversion makes a customer, or adds genuinely new contact details to one you already have. It does not make an appointment: nothing on this path books a slot.

Two things a conversion does that the button's own line is easy to skim past. It makes a car, when the enquiry carried a year, a make and a model — all three, typed as fields rather than described in the message — and any photograph the visitor attached moves onto that car with it. And it carries texting permission forward, but only the permission the visitor gave themselves: if they ticked the consent box on the form, the yes lands on the exact number they typed and on no other number on the record, credited to them rather than to the advisor who pressed the button. A visitor who left the box alone grants nothing, and that is recorded as not-yet-asked rather than as a stop.

The car it makes is a new car every time. A conversion does not look for a car the customer already has, because a year, make and model describe a category rather than one vehicle — three enquiries about the same truck on three mornings make three vehicle records on one customer. That is the deliberate trade: a duplicate you can spot and merge is recoverable, a reading written onto the wrong truck is not. If you take repeat enquiries from the same people, look at the customer's cars after converting, and use Merging customer records when two of them are one.

Spam, honestly

The form defends itself quietly. A hidden trap field and a minimum fill time turn away the crude majority of bots, and hourly limits — a handful per visitor, a larger backstop per shop — cap what any one attacker can pour in. A refused bot sees the same thank-you page a real person sees, because telling a spammer which defence caught them is how they tune past it.

What gets through is scored, and the score is advice, never a filter. A high score draws a Probably junk badge with the number shown, and drops the row down the page — it never hides one, and nothing deletes a request because of it. A shop that never sees an enquiry because a heuristic scored it has lost exactly the revenue this form exists to catch. You mark junk; the software only suggests.

For the forensics behind a bad patch — where a flood came from — each request keeps its network details for 90 days, and then they are scrubbed. The request itself, and everything the person typed, stays.

Every form asks permission to text, and the box is required

Every work request form asks for permission to text, in a box beside the phone field. It is not a setting and you cannot turn it off, so every number in your queue arrives with an answer instead of a guess. The box is required on this form: a request will not send until it is ticked, with or without JavaScript, and an unticked submit is refused with one sentence beside the box — Tick the box to send this request online, or call the shop. — and nothing written. A form with the phone field hidden takes no number and shows no box.

The wording beside the box is fixed, because the shortened version is the one that stops being worth having. It names your shop, says it may send them SMS text messages about this request and their vehicle, how often, that rates may apply, the words HELP and STOP, and that it does not sign them up for marketing. Because the box is required, it does not claim consent is optional; it ends Texting permission is needed to send a request online; you can also call the shop. — so anybody who will not tick it still has a way to reach you.

What gets stored is their answer, the moment they sent it, and the exact sentence they agreed to. It is permission to text about that request and that car — never a marketing opt-in. When you convert the lead the yes is carried onto that number, and onto no other number on the record, with its trail entry marked transactional only, so a campaign still skips that number until the customer opts in to marketing separately. Nothing is sent automatically either way.

Your online booking page asks too, with the same kind of box, but there it is optional: a booking sends unticked, and an unticked box records no consent.

Two more things you can ask for

How did you hear about us and Your address are both off until you turn them on, and both take the same Required, Optional or Hidden switch as every other field. The referral question offers whichever answers you type into the builder, one per line, and always leaves a way for somebody to write their own — a list with no way out of it collects the nearest option rather than the true one. Leave the list empty and the question is a plain box.

Both land on the customer record when you convert the lead, and neither overwrites anything you already had: a returning customer whose address you typed yourself keeps yours. The referral answer is the visitor's own words and is kept apart from the link tracking described above — somebody told about you by a friend who then scans a code on an invoice is both, and blending the two would make every number you read a mixture of what you measured and what you were told.

What they get back

The moment somebody presses Send, the form is replaced by your acknowledgement — their name, your shop's name, that a person will read it, an invitation to reply with days and times they are free, and your phone number as a link they can tap to call you. If they left an email address, the same words are emailed to them once, from your shop's name, and the last line on screen says so.

You write it, or you use ours. Settings › Work request form › After they send it holds a switch, a subject line and the words themselves, and Show what they see after sending under it draws the finished panel so you are not writing blind. Three things fill themselves in: {first} their first name, {shop} your shop's name, and {shopphone} your number off your document letterhead. Anything else in curly brackets is refused when you save rather than printed at a customer, and leaving the boxes empty gives you ours in the visitor's own language.

Untick Email them a copy and nothing is emailed — the words still appear on screen. A request from somebody who left no email address gets the screen and nothing else. So does an address that has asked you to stop, unsubscribed, or been put on your suppression list by anything else you send, because that list is checked first. And the same address never gets a second copy from you inside a day, however many requests arrive from it — one receipt is a receipt, five is a nuisance aimed at a mailbox that may not even exist. Whenever a copy did go, the row in Customers › Work requests is marked Acknowledged by email, so whoever picks up the phone knows this person has already heard from you once.