Mission Control

Mission Control acts as your guide as to what to spend your time doing in order to maximise your activity with your contacts. You can find mission control from either the main menu, or from the home page. Mission control also works includes tasks / activity from other modules when enabled, this tutorial will explain the use for the Contact module.

When you open Mission Control, you'll see two options in the box at the top left:

• Tasks - a list tasks assigned to you in chronological order, with the task due soonest shown first
• Activity - a list of activity showing the last actions carried out by you.

In this example the user is James Long, show tasks and activity are being shown by for this user. By hitting the 'X' you can change this user to another known to your Mashoom account, or view all the tasks and activities for the whole account. This user filter also applies to the graphs in the dashboard.

Information at Your Fingertips

Tasks are colour coded so that it's quick to see where you are with your day. The colour is shown to the left of the task in the list:

• Red - task is overdue, you'll see these at the top of the list
• Green - task is due to be completed
• Blank - task for the future, you'll see these last in the list

Two dashboards give you an overview of your activity and tasks.

The top graph of the screen breaks down the activities carried out by day and by activity type - see the inset box near the top right of your screen with different colours to explain the different types of activity. Activities like phone calls and meetings are coloured in green, emails in orange and notes in grey.

The bottom graph captures the number of tasks in the system at a given time, and if that tasks was overdue, due or in the future. Red is overdue, green is to do today and grey means to be completed in the future, showing you how you are controlling your overall workflow. A healthy graph is the one shown in our example; lots of grey, a bit of green and no red. An unhealthy graph would have lots of red; lots of overdue tasks. The overall height of the chart is also important, if that's going up then more activity is happening on the system, which is generally a good thing.

At a glance you, and others, can see how individuals are managing their task workload. By typing in another user's name you can see their allocated tasks and activities - for example, this could be used by the team to cover colleagues' work when they are not available ie holidays, training etc

Using Mission Control (With Contact Tasks)

Tasks can be completed directly from Mission Control. Select a task to complete and you will be presented with the contact's information page, giving all the information you need to review any previous activity with the contact (under Timeline) together with their contact details in the column headed "Details" - your task will be shown in the Timeline in more detail.

Select the blue box titled "Action Task" and make your choice of action from the five options. In this example you have made a call; select 'Phone call' from the row of options, complete the activity details and update Timeline by selecting "Add Activity" (in orange).

The Task Chain

Often once you've done some activity, you need to setup a new task in the future to follow up on that activity, and so forth. We call this the "task chain"; it's a powerful way of making sure you chase leads to their conclusion or ensure you keep in contact with a customer or client.

When completing a task, instead of selecting "Add Activity" (in orange), you select the blue box headed "Add and Schedule New Task" because you want to not only add your activity, but also set a task to follow up your email in a week's time.

Doing this will complete the task that was set by recording what happened, then add a new task in the future for the next bit of work. In this way, the orange "Add Activity" can be thought of as breaking the chain; use this when no more contact is required.