The Need:
Have you ever needed to request a form be completed by your parents/staff members, which still needs to follow an approval process?
Many users handle this by sending a custom signed or unsigned form and using office-use-only fields and triggers to create approval stages behind the scenes. While this can work, it’s not ideal for tracking each stage or sending reminders to approvers. As a result, forms can end up stuck in a pending state, waiting for someone to take the next step.
The Goal:
The purpose of using a self-service form is to easily track who has or hasn’t completed the request. Even better, you can take advantage of the built-in approval process to manage each step of approval or rejection along the way.
Use Case:
Requests for follow-up information on a student's absence (proof of an excused absence that still needs to be reviewed or approved by a staff member in the school).
How does it work:
Any organization looking to set something like this up can rely on triggers attached to groups to directly assign a self-service form to a set of users. To set these up, you will first identify the initiating step that will trigger the request for the self-service form. This could be the addition of a user to a group, or could be initiated by a trigger on another existing form:
Group-Based Trigger
In the group editing screen, the trigger options you will have include adding or removing a member from a group. You will then select the action you want to take place, in this case, it would be “Request a Self-Service eForm to be completed”. You then choose who will be the target audience of the self-service form, and finally, select the form you want them to complete and write out a default email that will be sent to the selected user.
For example, you could create a group for all students who had an unexcused absence on a given day. Then, set a trigger so that whenever a student is added to that group, their parents automatically receive a self-service request to submit absence documentation. The email could explain that their child was marked absent and include a form where they can upload a doctor’s note or other documentation to excuse the absence. After the request is sent, parents will automatically receive reminder notifications every two days until the form is completed.
Form-Based Trigger
The options here work much the same way, except instead of using the action of adding or removing a student from a group to trigger the request, you can use standard logic based on question responses or completed approval stages to automatically send a self-service form.