If you have staff out in the field - merchandisers, etc - you want to be able to effortlessly communicate with them about what their eyes on the ground are seeing. Avantalytics allows you to assign tasks and create questionnaires for these staff members so that they can stay remote and you still get data from them as they gather it. Data is always live and up to date when field staff complete tasks and fill out questionnaires about their store visits. Because this is such a vital component to gathering great data, you want to make sure your questions and assignments are communicated to staff in a way that is clear and concise, which will lead to higher completion percentages and better quality data. See below to learn some best practices.
Step-by-step guide
To write a great task:
- A well written title is paramount. The title is the first thing your staff member will see, so you will want to think carefully about what is the critical information you want to relay to or receive from the field staff. A clear and concise title will make your request clear from the outset.
- Keep the description short. Remember, you want your team member to keep his or her momentum going with store visits. Don't drag your staff down with needlessly wordy descriptions. Consider what, if any, information you need to put into the task that isn't conveyed in the title, and add only anything that is necessary for clarity.
- Think carefully about the priority level. Many people seem to think that marking everything as "Urgent" is a great way to make sure staff stay on top of tasks, but it only leads to confusion and a fear on behalf of the team member that failure is impossible to avoid if all "Urgent" tasks are not gotten to quickly. That way, when a task is marked "Urgent," your team member will know how to prioritize his or her day efficiently.
- Make sure the end date is not open ended if it does not need to be. Help people clear off their plates, so to speak, by putting an appropriate end date in the task each and every time you assign a task.
- Make use of Custom Regions, as you're allowed to assign tasks to specific, custom regions. If you have not yet learned how to leverage the Custom Regions feature that Avantalytics provides, make sure you visit our documentation page on the topic. Quickly divide tasks along parameters of your choosing - certain clusters of states, stores under one field team member, clusters of zip codes. The list is endless, and allows you to truly tailor your questions.
- Make sure to use our other great features like - automatic emails when a task is updated, the ability to upload pictures, the ability to make the task a recurring one and more!
To write a great question:
- Make it as easy to answer as possible. Avantalytics allows you to ask questions in multiple formats: free form, multiple choice, y/n, upload a picture and more. Each type is better suited toward different types of information gathering. Use this to your advantage to make the questionnaire as streamlined and painless as possible. Your staff will complete more questions and you will receive more meaningful data. For example, if you want to know how tidy a flower display looked, you could have your field staff answer the question by typing their response in a free form text box, or you could phrase the question as "On a scale of 1-10, how tidy is the flower display?" with a multiple choice selection from 1-10. The second format will clearly be quicker and easier to aggregate once you want to begin exploring the data gathered from your surveys.
- Make sure you only ask what you need. Field staff visit different stores, and we all know that time is money. Make sure you keep your questionnaires dynamic, timely and concise.
Want to get more in depth? This training video will teach you everything you need to know about tasks and questions in under ten minutes:
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