How to prevent system confusion when people fill out multiple forms in quick succession?

[Mike_Marzeotti]

We are a financial services company, and we offer special reports on our website with financial guides and our take on market activity. We require readers to fill out a form with some basic information to access these reports, and they can also check a box indicating that they'd like an adviser to reach out to review their portfolio. If someone new to our database asks for a portfolio review, Marketo assigns them a lead owner so they can be followed up on.

Some of our leads and prospects are older and not the most tech-savvy, and recently we've been seeing more and more people fill out 2 or 3 or more of these forms in very quick succession, probably without paying attention to what fields they're filling. When new leads do this, they run through multiple smart campaigns at the same time, getting assigned one lead owner, then immediately getting reassigned to another, which then has to be sorted out over email.

I've been trying to think of a good way to prevent this using steps in the flow, so that we still get the data on how many , but can't seem to find an elegant solution that would be practical to implement in dozens of programs. And even if I find a way to stop them from going all the way through the flow, will it work correctly if someone is going through multiple smart campaigns at once?

Any ideas for how I could fix this, or are we going to have to keep sorting it out after the fact?

[SanfordWhiteman]

The problem in such situations is that form submissions can come in just quickly enough to trip up one-at-a-time processing, but also too quickly for Activity Log lookback filters, or other cross-campaign filters, to be reliable.

Marketo isn't built to scramble like that and make sure that someone doesn't run through steps in independent campaigns at roughly the same time. Of course in many cases, duplication of the same step is a non-issue (like reassigning the same program status, or reapplying the same data value).

Assuming the forms are not being posted maliciously (as you say, non-savvy tech people) you can try to stem the tide on the client side. For example, set a cookie to record their last form fillout timestamp and don't show them another full form for the next couple of minutes.  (Note that while Known Visitor HTML does a similar thing, it requires that the session be already associated with the lead, and the 5-15s association might take is time you can't spare.)

[Mike_Marzeotti]

Thanks for the reply Sanford, 

Yes, there's already a step built into the program that would stop them from being assigned if they already have a lead owner, so I don't think adding another step to do something similar would help.

Thanks for your suggestion about using a cookie, that sounds promising. I don't know how to set something like that up, but would this be a reasonable request for our web developer? And would I be required to set anything else up on the Marketo side?

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

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but would this be a reasonable request for our web developer? 

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I hope so! This is a very simple concept, demoed here: MktoForms2 :: Min Time between form renders 

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And would I be required to set anything else up on the Marketo side?

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Nope.

[Mike_Marzeotti]

Perfect, thanks again Sanford!

Mike