How to make contact tracing easy!

Who is responsible for your business when it comes to some of the COVID19 measures? At thirteen letter we put the emphasis back on your business, because if someone contracts the virus or one of it’s variants in your business they will hold you accountable, not the public health authorities and not the government.

One of the easiest tools to implement is a contact tracing form and a pre-quiz for clients entering your business for a service. We can not speak to whom your web developer or what your online presence might be but there are several tools online that are free and easy to use for the purposes of tracking and tracing clients when it comes to preventing the spread of COVID19.

First you need a Google ID. This does not necessarily mean you need a Gmail address as some email providers give you a Google based email that also acts like a Google ID, conversely you can create a Google ID using your existing company email.  If you do not have a Google ID you can use this link to create one. https://accounts.google.com/SignUp.

What you specifically need from your Google ID is access to the FORMS feature in Google Drive. Visit here https://www.google.com/forms/. This is an example for created for this explanation. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dnZc34tFA54P7pQrTZ-X8xNQEAucFBNQWBl1MdMhWcQ/edit As you can see it asks all of the questions you would need to ask a client requesting services from your business if you were a athletic facility, hair salon, or any public service where the customer will be in your facility for service where they are in contact with your staff or contractors.

At the top of this form you can also view the responses, which importantly enough includes a date/time field. Why is this important? Well if you have someone return to your business who contacts you because they have tested positive the day they were in your business you can notify all clients who were in attendance during the same time frame. You can even notify clients up until you are assured your staff had cleaned the facility or work station that positive case came into contact with.

As much as notifying close contacts will cause you anxiety and stress, clients would rather hear it from your business than from a news story that included your business name with random dates and times.

Another form you can also create is a contact tracing form if you are a business that wants to allow clients in the facility for extended periods of time who will not be in contact with staff. You can take the example form provided and simply remove all of the questions related to COVID. Your form automatically tracks the date and time they attended.

Once you have created the form you need an important factor is the settings. No matter what form you have created in the top right you will see a gear icon.  You do want it to collect email addresses and send a response receipt no matter what. You do not want to limit log ins and respondents should not have access to edit or review the summary of the form.

after you hit the settings gear beside the send button this is what you should see.

Now being able to share it also includes the top right corner of this form and hitting the send button. These settings allowed you to add other people able to view the results of this form by clicking ADD COLLABORATORS, you will require their Google ID email. You then will see a LINK icon click this icon to get the URL or web address for the form to share with clients. It is a very unwieldy address to remember so simply copy it.  Save this URL somewhere easily accessible to you and staff. 

This is how you can add other people in your company to see the form results and who has filled it out.

There are a few ways to share this, you can add it as a link on all of your social media profiles. You will also notice the original Google Form had a Facebook and Twitter icon which would allow you to share it as a post as well.

This is how to get the link to share with customers and use in the following services for easy access.

Take the address to these next two places:

1) bitly.com: You can use BitLy to create a short address that is very easy to remember and post on printed materials you send to clients or post at the front door of your business.

How an iPhone in camera mode reacts to a QR Code.

2) https://www.the-qrcode-generator.com: This is a simple QR code Generator. When you paste the URL for your form into this website an image is generated. The beauty of this image is  almost every camera on an iPhone or Android phone knows that this image opens a website and will prompt customers and clients to visit the link.

As you can see from the images at this Starbuck’s they track clients sitting inside their location by busing a QR code that sends you to their contact tracing form online.  Why not post this image at the front door beside your “masks are required” sign and put some simple wording, if you plan to stay scan this code. Then if people are technically challenged you will also have a short bit.ly address for them to visit.

An example of how Starbucks presents their QR Code for customers enjoying their beverage on site.

Some words of caution is to review the form and insure staff can access this form in case of public health officials visiting. You also want to delete information in this form every thirty days.

Make customers and clients feel comfortable you are taking this public health threat seriously and they will be clients and customers for a long time.

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