How Can Vendasta’s Task Manager Help Remote Teams

At Vendasta, our goal is to empower local businesses by providing our agency and enterprise  partners the tools to support and nourish local business communities. 

With most local businesses having to adjust how they operate due to COVID-19, we at Vendasta want to make sure that our platform is serving these new needs of our users.

Task Manager helps users track and complete thousands of tasks and hundreds of projects everyday; however, we want to assist our partners even more. 

Therefore, we have launched #ProjectRemote. This initiative contains multiple Vendasta platform releases that can help our partner teams quickly adjust to working remotely. 

There are three impactful initiatives we are focusing on:

1. Organizing your day
2. Empowering transparent communications with your team
3. Showing proof of performance

Organizing your day 

The first challenge, which remote teams face each morning, is to organize their day so that they can meet their daily goals and address their daily challenges. 

To help our users be productive remotely, we’ve added the following features to our platform.

The new Task Manager overview page

When our users log into Vendasta each morning, they will see a new overview page showing them cards for:

1. Tasks that were completed yesterday
2. Tasks that are due today
3. Tasks that are overdue today

Each of these cards can be filtered to a specific team member. Clicking on the cards will take users to the task list, showing them the tasks that were completed and the tasks that are either due or overdue.

In addition to this, users will be able to see a daily analysis of upcoming tasks for the week to come. Like the three task cards, users can click on the two ‘upcoming tasks’ cards to go to their task list and get a quick look at their upcoming tasks.

Project templates

Creating organized project templates is important for effectively communicating the work to be done to your remote teams. Task Manager users now have more comprehensive options for organizing their project templates. Specifically, users can now:

1. Setup auto-generation of projects for any products they sell to their clients.
2. Setup auto-assignments for these projects to specific people or to the ‘account assignee’ (primary individual in charge of serving a client account).
3. Setup task dependencies for tasks based on pre-conditions.

Setup project templates to generate ‘visible’ projects that are visible to clients in their Business App.

Task notifications 

Task Manager users can set up notifications to ensure that their teams never miss important updates. Three key notifications to subscribe to help your remote teams track work are:

1. Task assignment notifications - Your team members will be notified when they are assigned a task.
2. Task unlocked notifications - Your team members will be notified when a task assigned to them in a project is unlocked. 
3. Task due notification - Your team members will be notified when tasks assigned to them are due.

Empowering transparent communications with your team

As most teams go remote, preserving communication transparency can become a key challenge. To make sure that teams are in sync and all work and communication is visible and transparent across, Task Manager is adding the following to its platform.

The new task list

The new Task Manager task list allows users to quickly and effectively communicate with their remote teams on any tasks they need to collaborate on. The new tasklist side panel allows users to:

1. Update account notes/description/public notes/private notes with rich text.
2. Add a hyperlink to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.
3. Quickly respond to a review or make a social post from the panel.
4. Send an email to your team or client.
5. Attach a file to a task to share it with your teams.

Email History 

One of the biggest challenges for new remote teams is keeping their email communications transparent and in sync to reduce the chances of overlapping client communication. In order to address this need for remote teams, all emails sent from Task Manager tasks for an account are stored in account history and show up in the new ‘email’ in Task Manager accounts.

To further improve transparency and coordination between teams working in Vendasta Task Manager and Sales & Success Center, the emails sent from Task Manager show up in account activity in Sales & Success Center.

Showing proof of performance

Tracking and measuring team performance is crucial for remote work teams. Keeping clients engaged and making sure that remote teams are performing well is key for the success of our enterprise and agency partners. To address the challenges of client engagement, Task Manager is adding the following features to our platform.

Project tracker 2.0

Keeping your clients informed and engaged on updates to their projects is essential under current circumstances. The new Task Manager project tracker makes this easy. 

Your clients will be able to see the tracker under ‘my products’ in their Business App. To provide essential project updates to your client, you can use the new project tracker to:

1. Easily make tasks and projects visible in Task Manager by toggling visibility ?
2. Send your clients a notification if work is waiting on them, by setting the task status as ‘waiting on customer’.
3. Keep your clients updated on tasks by adding rich text public notes, which will show up in the project tracker in Business App.

Status & Productivity Report

Finally, managers will easily be able to measure their team’s performance with the new Task Manager ‘status report’ and ‘productivity report’ page. 

With these reports, managers will be able to get insights into tasks that are open, in progress, and due for their teams, and dig into the performance of individual team members of their teams. These reports will help managers:

1. Measure overall task performance for tasks completed/due/overdue for a selected date range.
2. Measure task performance of their individual team members. 
3. Measure lead time and cycle time for tasks for their teams using the new cumulative flow diagram.

Status Report:

Cumulative Flow Diagram:

Conclusion

Due to the ongoing circumstances, it’s imperative that businesses and individuals will start working remotely sooner rather than later. And in order to do so, they must be equipped with the best-in-class tools and platform to support their teams and continue scaling their business.

With Vendasta’s Task Manager, agencies are now empowered to grow their business by being able to manage their customers’ digital fulfillment right from the comforts of their homes. 

So, what are you waiting for? Get on board the Vendasta platform and start fulfilling with ease.