Reassign tasks without moving customers
Hello folks,
It's almost year-end, and a lot of people on your team will take time off. Their customers will still need things while they're away.
Say Amanda is out next week (on leave). She has a renewal purchase order to chase for Grace, a quote Vikram needs before his budget review, and a callback Christopher is expecting on Monday. All of these are follow-up tasks in her name.
Someone needs to pick them up, and they'll need access to those customer records to do it. But you don't want to hand Amanda's customers to someone else just because she's on leave.
We built a kiosk for this. You press a keyboard shortcut, pick the tasks, and choose who covers them.
Think of it as a selective mass transfer: the tasks move, the customers don't.
Let's assume that two people are absent and you want to transfer their tasks. Here's a demo of a kiosk zooming through this workflow:
What you decide, and what the kiosk does
The people covering will see the tasks in their own task list. When Amanda is back, run the kiosk again with the cover's name and pick the tasks to hand back. Shared access stays until someone removes it.
Other ways to do this and their trade-offs
Mass transfer of tasks
In the Tasks module, you can select several tasks and transfer them to a new owner in one go. The slow part comes after that: opening every contact, lead and deal linked to those tasks and sharing each one. That's also where a step is easiest to miss. If the default organization permission for Contacts, Leads and Deals is Public, the person covering can already open those records, and this method is enough on its own.
It can do the whole job from a plain-language request, and it gets it right. But it works as a conversation: you read a list, reply with your choices and check a plan, and then each change goes through. Each turn of the conversation takes time. It is fantastic for one-off tasks that span systems and for work that is more exploratory in nature. For a workflow that is straightforward, it takes time and tokens that could be better spent elsewhere.
Kiosk Studio
The kiosk is quickest when covering for someone is a regular part of the job. It gathers the person's contact and lead tasks for you, you make each choice once, and the reassigning and sharing happen without opening a single record.
This video shows all three side by side:
Build it
What you'll need
Kiosk Studio, which is available in the Standard edition and above
Professional edition or above for the keyboard shortcut, which uses Client Script. On the Standard edition, you can place the kiosk on the home page instead.
A Zoho CRM connection for the function
What's in the kiosk
A Client Script command that opens it in a flyout from a keyboard shortcut, for managers only
A screen to pick whose tasks to cover and a due-before date
Two queries that fetch open tasks linked to contacts and to leads
A tasks (related to contacts) screen: pick the tasks, who covers them and their access level
A tasks (related to leads) screen with the same three choices
A function that reassigns the tasks, shares the records, and returns a summary
A results screen with Transfer More Tasks and a loop, so you can repeat the process for more people or tasks in one go
Have this running before your team's leave starts
The configuration guide covers every step, with the code ready to copy.
Make it yours
Add a third list for deal tasks.
Adapt the same steps for calls and meetings.
Modify the kiosk so that you can use it to revert tasks to the original owner and remove share access from the people who covered.
More Kiosk Studio Sessions
Each session covers one business scenario, the kiosk built for it, and how that kiosk is configured.
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