GoSpotCheck fulfills customer requests faster with Asana

Asana impact

• Reduced time spent on customer requests and overhead by eliminating 2-6 steps per request
• Improved communication and transparency among team members

GoSpotCheck, a software company reimagining how the mobile workforce works, is helping their clients make strategic decisions using web-based reporting and analytics. This data, along with the seamless communication opportunities their software provides, helps ensure field teams efficiently and effectively execute tasks via engagement-driven surveys in verticals such as retail, CPG, restaurant, facilities management, and beer, wine, and spirits.

Josh Mitchell, Director of Engagements for Professional Services, and his team are working with companies like PepsiCo, Under Armour, and Panera Bread to help them get real-time data from the field. They’re taking GoSpotCheck’s out-of-the-box software and making customizations to fit their clients’ unique business cases. Made up of Engineering Consultants and Engagement Managers, Josh’s team works together with Customer Success Managers to fulfill customer requests.

With a significant number of requests—40-50 every two weeks—GoSpotCheck’s Professional Services team needs a consistent and reliable way to track task execution and progress. However, without strong communication and transparency, Josh and his team experienced slower response times and tasks slipping through the cracks—which led to the team’s search for a turnkey work management system that everyone could use.

From sticky notes to a seamless workflow

For Josh, scheduling the work for customer requests was becoming laborious. He knew there was an opportunity for better coordination among team members to ensure important tasks wouldn’t be missed. Additionally, the Professional Services team was using a very manual workflow that often included writing tasks on the corners of sticky notes. They needed a more efficient way to organize them, determine what information should be on each task, delegate time per task, and then assign each one. Doing so electronically was critical so that tasks could be updated and reassigned quickly.

As Josh and his team kicked off their search for a tool that could take the place of their sticky note wall, they wanted a solution that would:

• Provide visibility into customer needs and requests in one place, including all communication connected to their request
• Capture historical data so Engineering Consultants could see initial requests from the Customer Success Manager and what happened over time

As it turned out, several Customer Success Managers on the team were already using Asana for personal task management, and the Professional Services team was utilizing it to capture customer requests.

After realizing they were making things harder on themselves by having their work in multiple places, GoSpotCheck’s Professional Services team opted to solely use Asana as their lifecycle tracking tool for their clients’ software customization and reporting requests. With Asana, everyone would have clarity around who owns which tasks, and the entire team could have a universal definition of “done.”

“Now, every morning during our stand-up we gather around a TV that shows our Asana board. We no longer have to use sticky notes on the wall.”

Communicating without a middleman

Today, the GoSpotCheck team has excellent communication between cross-functional team members when requests are moving from one person to another. Asana serves as their central communication hub and source of truth for all customer requests.

To provide clear overviews of each customer account, Josh’s team—along with their Sales and CS partners—house all projects related to a customer in a single Portfolio. This way everyone can see what’s going on with a particular customer. For example, in one Portfolio, there may be a reporting project, a custom development project, and a project from sales with agreed-upon requirements.

“With Rules, we now save 2-6 steps for each of our 40-50 customer requests per sprint because tasks are automatically added to other projects and moved through each stage.”

Josh’s team at GoSpotCheck also uses Rules to save time responding to customer requests. Now when someone completes a task in one project, it’s automatically moved to the appropriate column in the next project, saving them time and extra steps. Additionally, the Professional Services team uses the Asana integration with Toggl to track time per task so they know where they’re spending too much (or too little) time. Custom fields are also critical to the team’s workflow, enabling them to easily track things like the type of request and QA requirements.

Additionally, Asana helps the team streamline cross-functional communication. In the past, Engineering Consultants would have to go through an Engagement Manager to get to a Customer Success Manager. With Asana, there’s more flexibility so they can communicate directly within a task and remove the middleman when necessary. And as employees grow their careers by moving into different roles, the transition of customers, requests, and tasks to someone else is no longer stressful because everything is in Asana.

Measuring success one request at a time

With all of these changes to the Professional Services team’s processes, Josh has seen a significant impact on the overall business. The number of steps—and time spent on each—has decreased, while overhead has been reduced. Not only that, but the Professional Services team is now better able to deliver on customer commitments, which is how they ultimately define success.

So, what’s next for GoSpotCheck? In the near term, they’re looking to further grow their products' capabilities to empower their clients’ field employees. Their long-term mission remains the same: To reimagine how the entire mobile workforce works.

“Asana is going to be where the truth lives for us.”