Email is centralized to a user where information is in a silo that only the one user can truly see. This creates speed bumps, roadblocks, and chaos within an organization. There are ways to fix this chaos by centralizing everything and making these tasks available to the entire team. Not only does this bring visibility into the eyes of everyone within the company but also brings in collaborative teamwork. When workloads for some are less they can step up and tackle items in the work queue and speed the entire process and eliminate one person from slowly down items within the system. This not only helps get projects completed more efficiently but lists start shrinking rather than growing.
From an ownership perspective, you have greater insights into your business, what team members are doing, where you should be charging more, where you could be charging less, and which teams need help based on workload. You are also able to determine the averages for how long it takes to complete certain tasks, be able to more quickly see trends, and see areas for continued improvement.
From a client perspective, you can log in, see the status of your work (not started, in-progress, and completed) within easy to use dashboards. You can add additional information with notes and supporting documentation. You can do this at all hours of the day and at times that are convenient for you.
By utilizing tasks, you are also creating more accountability within the organization. With every task there is a start date but equally important are estimated end dates. This gives insights to people on when they should expect items to be done, if not before. This accountability allows to look at your own internal SLA’s (service level agreements) that you are meeting the completion dates. If you go over, what was the reason and how can it be prevented in the future?
Within any customer service organization, there are always ways to improve your effectiveness no matter how well-oiled your customer service machine is. When things are bad that isn’t when you start looking for “fixes”. You need to be looking for improvements when things are going well so that you avoid any bad periods in customer service. By implementing tasks within our entire customer service process we are able to help each other out as a team, have more visibility into what everyone is doing, assign tasks accordingly, move tasks to others, and more importantly solve customers problems in a faster and more timely manner.