Our Users Are So Smart: Simple prompt to create a follow-up To-Do
- Posted October 28th, 2008
- Filed under: Our Users are So Smart, Product Updates
Sometimes the best solutions are really the most simple.
A couple weeks ago, there was a great forum discussion on how to assign follow up tasks immediately after logging communications. This wasn’t just a back-and-forth, this was a full fledged discussion with forum users Bradley, Kenny, HansD, and Stewart taking part.
We have always had the ability to log a communication and to create a To-Do that was assigned to a user and linked back to a communication. But the forum users were looking for a way to “remind” the other users on their account to create a To-Do after logging a communication, if one was necessary. Many approaches were discussed, but the following messages made it clear what we needed to do:
From Bradley:
From a business-process stand point, logging a communication and generating the resulting task are a single action. Yes, you could log the communication, then open it, then start a to-do action. However, you’ve now undertaken three actions as opposed to one, any one of which a staff person could forget or be interrupted before completing.
And from Kenny:
For me, its the act of remotely communicating with another person that needs to be logged, and the next task programmed in simultaneously in such a way that it is not forgotten that is critical to a CRM.
So, in the confirmation box after saving the communication, we added a link to create a To-Do.
While he was in there, Sean made some great new additions as well. We used to store a link back to the communication in the details field of the To-Do. No more. Now it is directly linked to the communication, just as if you were linking it to a contact.
And Sean also added the ability for account admins to see the To-Do Lists of other users on the account.
What else was in last night’s update? Well, for one, I brought back microformats to BatchBook. Here, you can see the Firefox plug-in Operator detecting the hCard microformat on a Contact Detail.
If you’d like to read more about microformats (and see some incredibly old screen shots of BatchBook!), I wrote about them a while ago.
Oh, and there’s one more thing. We dressed up for Halloween!
We hope you like the latest updates. We’ve certainly got more coming at you!
