[June 2019] Upgrading to the New Release

It’s an exciting time at TaskRay as the dust is settling from the delivery of our June 2019 release. In this post, we’ll highlight some of the ways that existing TaskRay customers can take advantage of the new functionality. For a refresher on everything that’s included in the June 2019 release, check out the full release notes.

 

Start Using the Customer Onboarding Kickoff Flow for Sales Handoffs

TaskRay now includes the new Customer Onboarding Kickoff Flow, a template screen Flow which guides users through the process of kicking off a customer onboarding project in TaskRay from Salesforce Opportunities. It’s a great way to get customer onboarding started on the right foot (something we discuss at length in TaskRay and Gainsight’s newest eBook, Perfecting Your Handoffs) and also offers some powerful new options for setting up exactly the right type of project in TaskRay. Let’s dig into how you can start using the Customer Onboarding Kickoff Flow. 

Consider Existing Automations for TaskRay Projects

A good thing to do before getting started with the Customer Onboarding Kickoff Flow is to take an inventory of any existing automations you may have which currently create TaskRay Projects from Opportunities. For example, many TaskRay customers use Salesforce automations like Process Builders to create projects in TaskRay for closed/won Opportunities. This method of creating projects is still very useful, but you may want to consider replacing a fully-automated process with a more deliberate approach using the Customer Onboarding Kickoff Flow. Here are a few tips to help you choose the right strategy:

  • You might want to replace the fully-automated process with the Customer Onboarding Kickoff Flow. There are benefits to making choices about kicking off projects, and doing formal handoffs can help transfer critical knowledge and information between customer-facing teams.
  • You may want to incorporate both options. Some projects might be worth creating deliberately through the Kickoff Flow, whereas simpler and more clearly-defined projects might be best for fully-automated creation. Just remember to be thoughtful about how you currently automatically create projects so your users don’t inadvertently create multiple onboarding projects for a given deal.
  • If full automation is working well for you, you may want to continue creating projects in the same way. If your onboarding process is very well-defined and you’ve set up everything your organization needs for customer projects to be created automatically, that’s great! Stick with it if it’s working well for your team.

It’s critical to get your team aligned with the overall strategy for kicking off onboarding projects in TaskRay. After all, collaboration only works when everyone involved knows their responsibilities and understands the importance of what they’re doing, so establishing a process and making sure everyone is on the same page when it comes to onboarding project kickoff will help you succeed.

Add the Flow to Opportunities

The easiest way to start using the Customer Onboarding Kickoff Flow is to add the new packaged Lightning Action to an Opportunity Page Layout. This provides users with a way to simply click a button to launch the Flow.

Kick_Off_Onboarding.gif

If you use the TaskRay Console, or just want to be a bit cheeky about how you conditionally allow your users to launch the kickoff Flow, you can add the Flow directly to an Opportunity Lightning Record Page and consider using filters to control when it’s shown to users.

Add New Fields to Opportunities

To start tracking your customers’ Desired Outcomes and give sales users a way to track their Deal Handoff Notes, you can add these two new TaskRay fields to Opportunity Page Layouts. It’s a good idea to get your sales team up-to-speed on what these new fields allow them to track and why it’s important - you can even consider ways to incentivize the population of this data!

 

Start Calculating Customer Onboarding Scores

The Customer Onboarding Score is a new metric in TaskRay which calculates a numeric score that represents the success of onboarding projects. Scores can range from 0-10 and take into account two main factors: project satisfaction and on-time completion. To learn more about exactly how the Customer Onboarding Score is calculated, check out this article.

Here are a few tips to start calculating Customer Onboarding Scores for projects in TaskRay:

Complete Projects and Provide the Required Data to Calculate Onboarding Scores

The easiest way to calculate Customer Onboarding Scores is to use the TaskRay Customer Onboarding Completion Flow.  The Customer Onboarding Score requires a project to be completed and for sentiment to be captured in order for a score to be calculated, and this Flow Template provides a streamlined way to populate that required information:

Onboarding_Feedback_and_Sentiment.png

When a project has been completed through the Flow and at least one of the Internal Sentiment or External Sentiment fields are populated, a Customer Onboarding Score will be calculated for the project:

Success_-_Completed_Project.png

Adjust Score Deductions

By default, TaskRay is configured to deduct points from the Customer Onboarding Score based on how far behind schedule a project was completed. The default score deductions are defined as such:

Onboarding_Score_Deductions.png

However, on-time completion of onboarding projects matters more to certain organizations than others. If your business delivers onboarding services based on a contractually-defined schedule, missing key dates can have serious consequences. In contrast, if your team is more concerned with customer sentiment and satisfaction during the onboarding process, on-time completion might matter less when it comes to measuring overall project performance.

To adjust the default score deductions that are applied to the Customer Onboarding Score in TaskRay, follow the steps in this article.

Track Onboarding Scores with Template Performance View or Salesforce Reports

Once you get started calculating Customer Onboarding Scores for TaskRay Projects, you can begin to use this data to help inform decision-makers, analyze trends in project performance, and ultimately take action to improve your organization’s customer onboarding processes.

One great way to start tracking onboarding scores is with the new Template Performance View. The average Customer Onboarding Score for selected projects is shown here to provide a quick synopsis of project performance:

Template_Performance.png

If Salesforce Reports are more your style, consider using one of the new reports included in TaskRay to measure customer onboarding scores:

Customer_Onboarding_Scores_Report.png

 

Start Tracking Time with the Timer

The Timer allows users to track their time on their tasks in real time, much like a stopwatch. If your users need to keep track of the time that’s spent on tasks while working them (like for billable time spent working on customer projects), the Timer is a great option.

The Timer can be accessed from Kanban View, Row View, and My Work. To start using the Timer, simply click the icon and select the appropriate option:

Start_Timer.gif

Don’t forget to stop active Timers when you’re done working on a given task. A green Time icon indicates you have active Timers which can be stopped:

Stop_Timer.gif

 

Update Historical Project Data for Performance View

With the June 2019 release, TaskRay introduced new ways of tracking and measuring the lifecycle of projects. The new Completed checkbox and Actual Completion Date field work in tandem to track exactly when a Task, Task Group, or Project is actually completed. This allows you to accurately measure the duration of projects as compared to their original plan - a critical metric for many customer-facing project teams.

These new fields do a great job of tracking this information on new TaskRay Projects created after the June 2019 release. However, in order to track this same information on historical projects where these fields are empty, system admins can run a built-in utility to complete historical TaskRay Projects and Task Groups that have 100% progress, respectively.

The utility executes the following updates on all Projects and Task Groups where the Completed checkbox is not set to true but Progress is 100%:

  1. Sets the Completed checkbox to true.
  2. Sets the Actual Completion Date to the value of the Estimated End Date for the Project or Task Group.

This utility can be run from the Tools & Settings menu:

Run_Migration_to_Complete_All_Projects.png

We’re excited about how these new features will help our customers deliver world-class customer experiences using TaskRay!  For more information and to see some of these new features demonstrated in action, please check out the June 2019 TaskRay Release Webinar.

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