Collaboration | | Published May 11, 2018

Why Collaborative Task Management is Important

Like any business, we all have different customers with different needs. Some customers have basic issues, while others have highly complex problems that can’t be solved in a single response by even your best agents.

For these customers, it’s important to make sure some sort of task management solution is built directly into your customer support software. Often the customers with the most complex issues are also very important to your business success, so getting their issues resolved in a timely fashion is crucial. That’s why there’s no time to bounce between a stand-alone task management solution and your support software!

Here are a few of the key reasons collaborative task management should be included in customer support software…

Task management keeps the support team organized – While collaboration is great, it can be a hinderance without proper communication tools. Similar to issue tracking, task management directly within support software ensures two different agents aren’t trying to solve the same piece of the puzzle, and that nothing gets missed. This obviously eliminates duplicate work, meaning agents are making the most of their time by working on their own unique issues.

It lets multiple team members work on different parts of the same ticket at the same time – When a ticket is complex and requires multiple “experts” in your company to resolve it, getting a good response to the customer in a timely fashion can be difficult. Task management within customer support software thrives in this scenario, because it can “break out” a ticket into different tasks for specific agents or teams to work on. For example, a customer may indicate they are having an issue with a product, but they don’t remember when the product was purchased to know what warranty is provided. While the main agent over the ticket investigates the product issue, it can assign a task in the support software for accounting to determine exactly when the product was purchased (and obtain the warranty). This method of collaboration is much more efficient than waiting until each task is completed, then sending the ticket onto the next team for them to complete their part.

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Task management makes employee planning and strategy easier – Business leaders can look at task management information in support software to see where employees need to prioritize their time. There’s no longer a need to sift through countless emails to figure out that missing piece needed to close a ticket. Instead, it’s easy to ping an employee and say “we need your help with this task quickly”, get 10 minutes of their time (even if they have higher priority tasks), and close the ticket. No more letting tickets linger for longer than needed because of one small task. This type of efficient collaboration with team members can be very valuable to a business.

 

In short, task management is important to have in customer support software because it streamlines collaboration and provides responses to customers faster. Agents aren’t in conflict by working on the same area of a ticket and they can easily loop in other departments to help with a specific task. In addition, full task visibility makes it easier for leadership to view ticket progress and follow up as needed to assist in closing tickets. Task management solutions within customer support software is a natural fit for many businesses!