How TaskStream helped two small businesses revolutionise their workflows.
Salcombe Embroiderers are a bespoke embroidery business, primarily putting logos and text on garments, both customer supplied and from stock. They also outsource clothing repair to a local tailor/seamstress. Clients vary from nationwide businesses and military regiments to holiday visitors.
Before TaskStream, managing the quotation process, getting approval, tracking tasks within the business, and particularly contacting clients, consumed significant resource and attention. Overall, the bureaucratic elements of the business were a substantial part of the working day, and, with the noise of the embroidery machines, work had to stop whilst, often fruitless, calls were made to customers.
Once TaskStream was switched on, then overnight most of these problems went away. It became clear where everything was, tasks languishing due to lack of customer response were quickly identified, customer contact was immediately improved (a couple of clicks and an SMS text message is in the hands of the customer, with a copy of the message in their email account).
A byproduct of the system is the easy to access record of who did what, when, and what communication had been sent or received. This makes it very easy to deal with a customer calling up. All the staff need to do is pull up the relevant task, and they can have a meaningful discussion about the task in question.
One point made very clear by this TaskStream customer was that the staff took minutes to learn and understand the working and use of the system, and immediately recognised it and embraced it as a tool which makes all their lives easier.
"As a man with a healthy cynicism about all the benefits of modern technology as promoted by the I.T. industry, I am now having to admit defeat.
Task Stream does exactly what it says on the tin, and has improved our efficiency beyond my wildest expectations.
In the short time we have been using it, it has become so much a part of our process control that I am wondering how we managed before. I would recommend it to anyone."
Nigel Martindale, Salcombe Embroiderers
Actionwest is a local Business & Domestic Systems Retail and PC Repair Shop
The problems were primarily:
Tracking tasks through the business. A customer call typically triggered a search of the premises to find the equipment in question in order to understand its repair status.
Contacting customers for approval for service actions, e.g. new power supply, or to discuss the economic viability of repair, or perhaps to obtain license keys for any necessary reinstallation. People can be hard to contact during the business day - meetings etc. Voicemails often go unlistened to. It can be pointless to email people because the device they use for email is the one being repaired.
These problems completely disappeared once TaskStream was in use. A customer call is now seconds to find the Task in question, and gain immediate access to both its current status, and the history of events. Another benefit in this area is the occasional customer who comes in with a problem, complaining that this is a recurrence of a previous problem. It has been useful to pull up previous tasks from the same customer and show that in fact the previous issue had been a different one. Informed debate is usually far less emotional than uninformed debate.
Contacting customers via SMS has been a very popular move, it only takes seconds for an Actionwest staff member to get a message to a customer, e.g 'please approve this parts purchase', or your 'goods are ready for collection'.
Overall, TaskStream has enabled a real improvement in customer service.
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