Manage your team's activities using Projects
Hybrid and remote work has become the normal work culture. Companies are investing in cloud infrastructure, and AI-assisted tools that reduce routine effort and keep teams aligned. Customer service has changed just as much. Cloud-based platforms are now the standard, and AI is built into them: chatbots and virtual agents resolve common queries instantly. Customers expect fast, personalized, and consistent support across chat, email, and messaging apps. These expectations now shape how businesses evaluate their software, willing to pay premium prices for software that is intelligent and has the ability to function without losing the human touch.
Zoho Service Plus, the all-in-one customer service management suite, helps businesses manage omnichannel support and handle customer needs by providing all the tools needed to assist them across industries.
The Projects module of Zoho Service Plus is a robust project management tool used to help individuals and teams keep track of their activities within a project environment, no matter where they are working from. This helps all users, right from project managers to sales and marketing, to see the progress of tasks and activities across all their departments as everything remains in one single place. All stakeholders involved in a project can monitor progress with minimum communication streamlines and centralize the work.
Projects also helps to bridge the gap created between resolving customer issues and the work or co-ordination that needs to be done within the team to fix the issue. Maintaining such activities logs also helps to avoid a repeat of the issue as it provides clarity on the timeline taken by each team to work on the issue and the extent of work done to avoid repetition.
Real-world applications of Projects in Zoho Service Plus
A recurring issue of data sync failure is being reported by multiple customers at Zylker Systems and Services, which results in repetitive tickets. The tickets are relevant to the same issue and need to be rectified from the back-end, so the support executive creates a task directly from the ticket in Desk to land in the internal project management module Projects, and brings it to the notice of all involved teams. This is a type of issue that doesn't just involve the ticket to be resolved, but involves collaboration across multiple teams and stakeholders.
Product management, engineering and QA, user-education, and support teams are aligned on the updates to the task, and they all take care of the respective steps to follow to rectify the issue and update the customer on their queries. This results in faster resolution and consistent communication within the involved teams. Having all the information in a single place also helps in better reporting and analysis on how much time and efforts are involved in the resolution of an issue, making it easier to plan future improvements.
Key features of Projects that could be used in customer service
Convert recurring tickets to tasks/issues in Projects
With the Desk-Projects integration within Zoho Service Plus, you can keep track of repetitive tickets about a recurring bug by creating a task or issue directly from within the ticket in Desk. To put this use-case to action in your business, ensure you've integrated Desk with Projects.
Create, assign priority to tasks, and set deadlines
Manage activities within your teams and with other teams in collaboration by creating tasks. You can add tasks from any of the views, such as List, Gantt, or Kanban, directly to a project. For repetitive tasks, you can add a task to any existing task list template, or create a new one to handle frequent tasks or a group of tasks. You can also add a task and assign it to multiple people with a designated priority level via email; or add a task directly to an in dividual from the workload reports. Tasks can also be associated with multiple users as a team and can be viewed filtering them by the team. The priority level can be set between Low, Medium, and High, and deadlines can be chosen for a task depending on the work hours.
Analyse Reports and dashboards
Reports and dashboards available within Projects give a comprehensive view of how the entire team is performing, the status of tasks and issues being worked upon, milestones, and progress. Reports like Planned vs Actual help to analyze the planned budget and time versus the actual cost and time taken for each task; the workload report helps to assess if the work within the team is being equally distributed and aids to reassign tasks to avoid accumulation of work for a single person. Portal and project level reports provide an opportunity to track overall progress of tasks and issues, SLAs, and impact within the team, so you can decide how much time and efforts are needed in further process improvements.
To add and manage a task in Projects
- Add a task directly to a project under the Tasks module, within any of the available views.
- Add a name and description for the task.
- Select a task list from the drop-down if it's a part of a group of tasks that you've saved under lists.
- Add any screenshots or ticket updates as files or attachments.
- Choose an associated team to assign it to a group of users.
- Select a task owner or resource who will be directly responsible for the task.
- Set work hours for the associated resource to track the time taken.
- Choose a start and end date and set a deadline.
- Select a priority: None, Low, Medium, and High.
- Enter a tag to associate the task with a specific customer, task list, project, or milestone.
- Add a task reminder and choose the frequency so that you don't miss the task.
- Choose a recurring frequency from the drop-down if the task is repetitive.
- Click Add.
- Click the Edit icon at the top-right corner of the task window to edit the layout and to add/remove fields.