A machine stops on site
The client sells and services construction machinery, mainly excavators. A machine stops on a construction site. What does its owner want to know then? Only whether the service team already knows about the breakdown. The owner sends the request through a form on the dealer’s website, and from there it goes to the service team.
No confirmation
The service request form ran on the JetForm plugin. It was set up in an amateur way, some of its text was left untranslated, and the confirmation to the person submitting it often did not go out.
The owner of a stopped machine sent a request. And did not know if it had reached the service team.
New form
We built the new form on Contact Form 7. The fields stayed the same. It looks like the rest of the website. For the dealer’s customers the only change is that they get a confirmation after sending it.
Every request is saved in the website’s database and is not lost even when there is a problem with e-mail. The notification with the request goes to the same service address as before. The service team did not have to change anything in how they work.
Cloudflare Turnstile stops spam and can be switched to invisible verification. Along the way we worked around a bug that appeared in Contact Form 7 at the time: with caching enabled, the form returned errors.
E-mail confirmation
Right after sending, the requester gets an e-mail saying the request has been received. The client edits the text of this message in the WordPress panel and does not need a developer for it.
After testing, the client had one comment: the auto-reply was hard to read. We added bold text, spacing and lines that separate the parts of the message.
SMS confirmation
The form connects to Make through a webhook. We wrote our own plugin for it: it passes the data from Contact Form 7 and makes it easy to change what goes to Make.
The Make scenario receives the request and sends the requester a confirmation through an SMS gateway. The sender shows as the name of the service, which tells the customer right away who is writing.
SMS log in a spreadsheet
Every SMS sent goes into a Google Sheet on the client’s Drive together with the delivery status. If someone types a wrong phone number into the form, a bounce appears in the spreadsheet and the service team can contact that person by e-mail.
Documentation
The client and the person who configures the webhook got a PDF guide, "Contact Form 7 integration with Make.com". It describes how the form connects to Make. With it, the next change in the scenario is easy to order or to make yourself.
Timeline and hours
The brief, a mini audit of the website and the quote took three days, from 12 to 14 August 2025. We started the work on 26 August, and on 29 August the new form was ready for testing at a separate address, connected to a test webhook.
Then we agreed access and the Make configuration with the client. On 22 September the scenario was ready and tested, and the webhook was switched to the production one. On 23 September three test SMS messages arrived correctly and the new form replaced the old one. On 24 and 25 September we improved the look of the auto-reply and closed the project.
The whole project took about 13.5 hours of work: the form about 10 hours, the Make scenario about 2 hours, analysis and the quote about 1.5 hours.
What changed
Whoever reports a breakdown gets a confirmation by e-mail and SMS and knows the service team has the request.
The service team works as before, on the same e-mail address. A copy of every request stays in the website’s database, and the spreadsheet shows which SMS was not delivered.
