A top request from customers has been the ability to loop in more than one contact on those autogenerated notifications — status updates, comments, payments, all of it. Good news: it's here. Read on for how to set up automatic contacts and how to add a one-off contact when a specific application needs it.
Multi-Contact Key Field Assignment:
This new feature updates how the applicant key fields are assigned. Now, when you navigate to the Form Builder and hit the settings button, you'll see a collection box style field where you can list automatic contacts using fields within the application.
A single contact entry is required for the application to work; however there may be application types where you'd like to ALWAYS have the applicant and owner, or owner and contractor, receive all notifications.
Hit the Add Contact Mapping button to create a new contact and select which application field you'd like pulled into each slot.
During the rollout of this feature, your existing applicant contact settings were pulled into the new feature, so you shouldn't have to edit these for existing application types.
These new Key Field settings control what contacts should automatically be created when an application is submitted. Next, we'll look at how you can add an additional contact to a single application.
One-Off Contact Addition:
Here's one of the more common scenarios we hear about. In general the listed contractor shouldn't be included on notifications for ALL applications, but there's one specific application where a contractor is more involved and would like to be notified.
In these types of situations, you can simply manually add them to the list of contacts and check the box to include them in the system notifications.
Simply hit the Contact Edit button:
And input the applicable contact information before hitting Add Contact:
It's also possible to add a contact and not check the automated communication box. In this case, they wouldn't get the automated messages, but would be added to the application contact book in case staff needs to reach out to them via phone or email.
A Note on Contact Editing:
When you click the Contact Edit button you can edit the information for any one-off contacts who were added from the application portal. However, if you try to edit the primary contact you'll get this error:
Primary contact details must be edited within the Permit Details section rather than within the contact book.
And that's it! You no longer have to manually forward emails or copy the applicant portal link and email it over separately to additional contacts. There's now a one-stop-shop to include multiple contacts within an application.