When your intake needs to know where, not just who

Most intake flows collect the same things: name, email, what you need, when you need it. For a lot of businesses that’s enough. But for a growing number of use cases, the most important piece of information is where something happened or where someone is.

That’s what we built the geolocation question for.

What it does

The geolocation question is a new question type in ioZen’s IntakeBot editor. When a respondent reaches it in the conversation, they see a Share Location button. The browser asks for location permission. Once they allow it, ioZen captures their GPS coordinates and stores them with the submission.

The respondent sees a static map preview so they can confirm the location looks right. Your team sees the same thing in the submission detail, with a link to open the pin in Google Maps.

That’s the whole interaction. No forms to fill out, no address typing, no risk of a mistyped street number sending someone to the wrong place.

Who it’s for

We built this expecting inspectors and service teams to use it first. That’s still the core audience. A contractor doing a pre-project site assessment, an insurance adjuster documenting an incident location, a property manager logging a maintenance report. These are all cases where the answer has to be “where this happened” and a typed address isn’t reliable enough.

But since launching, we’ve heard from people using it in ways we didn’t anticipate.

Event check-ins. Delivery confirmation for last-mile logistics. Proof-of-visit workflows for franchise oversight. A security team that needed incident location as part of their report intake. A real estate company that wanted to capture where a showing request was coming from.

The pattern across all of them: they needed verifiable location, not self-reported location. The distinction matters. An address someone types is what they say. GPS coordinates are where they actually were.

The details that matter

No API keys. The map preview uses OpenStreetMap tiles. You don’t need to set up a Google Maps API, manage billing for geocoding calls, or configure anything beyond adding the question to your bot.

Works with private and encrypted questions. If your use case involves sensitive location data, you can mark the geolocation question as private (excluded from AI features) or encrypted (Vault-backed storage). The same options that exist for other sensitive questions apply here.

Available on all plans. Free, Pro, and Business. No plan restriction for this question type.

AI-assisted generation. If you describe an intake flow that clearly involves location capture, ioZen’s AI will propose a geolocation question as part of the generated flow. You still control the final setup.

When not to use it

Geolocation works well when you need to know where someone physically was. It’s not the right choice when you need a structured address for mailing or routing, because coordinates don’t map cleanly to street addresses without a geocoding step.

For most address collection, a text question with clear instructions still works fine. The geolocation question is for cases where physical presence or precise location matters more than a formatted address.

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If this sounds like something your workflow needs, you can add a geolocation question to any IntakeBot in ioZen today. It takes about 30 seconds to set up.