Inquire.ly – Forming Stronger Bonds

When companies use their websites as a place to solicit feedback from customers or connect with potential clients, they generally rely on web forms to gather the information they anticipate bringing in. Embedded forms serve as a valuable tool for collecting information, and yet the information that’s gathered through most online forms tends to be difficult to organize and quantify in any meaningful way.

Inquire.ly is a tool that you can use to make sense of the data being gathered through your online forms. Rather than forwarding form submissions to your email inbox, or letting the information sit in a CMS that rarely gets used, you can integrate Inquire.ly into your own online system. Visit your Inquire.ly dashboard page to get a quick overview of all the activity coming in through your forms. When new inquiries are received or new comments have come in, you’ll be able to find out via the dashboard page. In addition to showing what your online visitors have submitted, Inquire.ly also shows what your colleagues have been up to – seamlessly logging each time a colleague views a form submission or logs into or out of the system. Inquire.ly even provides links to the social networking accounts for any visitors who enter their email addresses when submitting online forms on your site.

Although Inquire.ly does provide its own form builder tool, you don’t have to use it to take advantage of everything else the web-application has to offer. Inquire.ly works equally well with forms built with Wufoo and Gravity. Larger companies with customer support teams can also use Inquire.ly to track bugs, managing application submissions, and organize incoming messages without relying on forwarded emails and spreadsheets.

Practical Uses:

• Keep track of the competition entries being submitted by your readers
• Make sure the appropriate person is contacted about a bug on your site
• Reply immediately when a potential client enters a query on your website
• Route important messages to the correct employee

Insider Tips:

• People can build forms with Inquire.ly’s form builder tool
• Inquire.ly works with forms built with Wufoo and Gravity
• Employees can add notes to any inquiry
• Inquire.ly can automatically label messages based on importance

What we liked:

• Businesses can use Inquire.ly to quickly route incoming messages
• Inquire.ly is a great tool for companies sorting through contest entries
• Companies with multiple employees can use Inquire.ly to reduce redundancies
• People don’t have to create forms with Inquire.ly to take advantage of the rest of the app

What we didn’t like:

• Nothing

Alternatives:

• Capsule – http://capsulecrm.com
• Funnela – http://funnela.com
• Streak – http://www.streak.com

Company Info:

• Launched: March 2012 (Beta)
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: Fife, Scotland
• Founded by: Matt Lanham
• Web site: http://inquire.ly

Costs:

• Plans range from free to $250 per month