Estás haciendo malabarismos con múltiples proyectos de atención al cliente. ¿Cómo puedes mantenerte organizado y al tanto de todo?

Balancing multiple customer support projects requires effective time management, clear goals, and the right tools. From my experience juggling a weekend MBA program, parenting, and full-time work, I’ve learned to maximize productivity in limited time. Authenticity and honesty with customers significantly assist in eliminating chaos and improving clarity. Other key strategies include prioritizing your calendar, setting realistic goals, and saying "no" when necessary to stay focused on core objectives. Start your day with the most important task, and handle quick tasks immediately. Use digital tools like Focus-To-Do and Pomodoro timers to stay organized. Most importantly, ensure you take care of yourself and your family to maintain balance.

I will immediately assess all current projects, prioritize tasks using a matrix based on urgency and importance, and focus on addressing critical issues first. This approach will ensure deadlines are met, customer expectations are managed, and operations run smoothly. I'll follow up with an update on the progress soon.

Prioritize: Focus on urgent and important tasks first. Use Tools: Leverage project management tools for tracking. Time Block: Allocate specific times for each project. Set Goals: Break projects into clear, manageable tasks. Check-in: Regularly update clients and team members. Keep Notes: Maintain detailed notes for easy reference. Delegate: Assign tasks when possible. Focus: Avoid multitasking for better efficiency. Stay Flexible: Adapt to changes as needed. These steps will help you stay organized and on top of multiple projects.

To manage multiple customer support projects effectively, businesses should prioritize tasks based on their urgency and importance. While a prioritization matrix is helpful, a more comprehensive approach should consider factors like customer value, long-term business goals, resource availability, risk assessment, customer satisfaction, and continuous evaluation. By incorporating these elements, businesses can ensure that their customer support efforts are aligned with their objectives and meet the needs of their customers.

In addition to tech tools (which can be multiple tools at once depending on the customer, just to add to complexity), there is only one way to ensure the team can support: Provide enough engineers/techs to cover the multiple projects. Limited resources will always drive management to ad hoc decisions; everything is a priority, or a blocker. And when everything is a Blocker, then nothing is a blocker. We are beyond our capability to manage complexity with the defacto expectation that the same people do more and more.

In my experience tools are as good as what is fed into the tool and how collectively everyone on a project uses the tool to diligently create a single source of truth. Hence key should be to have tools and commitment by all project members to contribute and maximize on ability to recognize progress, issues and dependencies.

Tools are powerful but it is dependent on our clarity of what organisation is needed. As an example of Asana’s capabilities and integrating automation, I’ve had success using the in-task communication to keep team dialogue in-app. It means any emails I received, were external only. Automation tools can also bind Asana projects to calendars enabling appointments to be synced to a team calendar in real-time which makes for efficient scheduling and rostering.

Tools like Trello, Asana, or Monday.com can help you track tasks, deadlines, and progress. Set up boards or lists for different projects to keep everything organized.

Project management tools like Trello or Asana allow you to organize tasks, set deadlines, and collaborate with your team using visual boards or lists to track project progress. Email stacking is another useful technique. It involves organizing emails by priority or category, ensuring you address the most urgent matters first and declutter your inbox. Using the Outlook calendar effectively can also help manage tasks and schedule projects. By setting reminders and deadlines, you can keep track of important dates and ensure timely completion of tasks. This combination of tools and techniques can greatly improve your productivity and project management capabilities.

Beyond basic tools like CRM and project management software, businesses can benefit from live chat, ticketing systems, knowledge bases, AI-powered chatbots, analytics tools, and integration capabilities. These technologies can improve customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and provide a competitive advantage.

If you have team members, delegate tasks based on their strengths and expertise. This not only helps lighten your load but also empowers others.

When dealing with multiple projects there is usually multiple number of HR. Make use them them, know who handles which project, know their roles and make your work easy by delegating. You may become more efficient if you delegate, do not try to do everything yourself. Remember! delegate but still review and follow up to ensure alignment and deliverables.

It's imperative to delegate tasks to others on your team - no matter how much you want to manage everything, it's IMPOSSIBLE! As an entrepreneur, it's hard to give pieces of "your baby" to someone else, especially if they're newer to your organization. That being said, it's crucial to vet your new hires across many aspects and qualifications before bringing them onboard. Then, ensure that they receive proper training on the front end about your SOPs, clients to which they're being assigned tasks, etc. Finally, don't forget to hold meetings on a regular basis to maintain a system of checks and balances - don't micromanage but rather ensure everyone is on the same page and nothing is misunderstood, unclear, or going off the rails.

"Déléguer, c'est avant tout un acte de confiance. En attribuant les bonnes tâches aux bonnes personnes, vous maximisez l'efficacité tout en permettant à chacun de s'épanouir dans ses forces. La clé ? Une communication claire et des suivis réguliers pour assurer que tout roule. Quand on délègue judicieusement, on ne répartit pas simplement des tâches, on construit une équipe plus forte."

Do not not assume that the person knows or that they will do not it simply because it is part of their Job description. Maintain communication, send out reminders, share feedback, acknowledge emails, follow up written communications telephonically and keep track of documents in cloud folders. You'll be assured success.

Managing multiple projects daily requires having the right resources in place to achieve your desired outcome. In my experience having regular team huddles are essential in achieving success. Open regular communication allows team members to volunteer for roles and responsibilities within the delegated teams and assist each other overcome roadblocks. Establishing clear lines of communication and where to go for resources or assistance empowers team members to draw on their resources assisting in up skilling and driving effective communication and collaboration to achieve functional teams and project success. Often revealing hidden talents and providing opportunities for career satisfaction and sense of achievement.

Start each day by identifying the most critical tasks and tackling those first. This ensures that you're making progress on the most urgent issues. Allocate dedicated time blocks for each project. This helps you stay focused and avoid being overwhelmed by frequently switching between tasks.

This is imho the most important part to handle multiple projects in parallel. Usually I'm not a fan context switching every hour. If I have more than one project to work on, I comunicate my working hours to the clients (e.g. 7-12 for customer A, 13-18 for customer B). One exception are the daily standups, I'm trying to attend all of them. The other exception are the sprint switch days. I'm almost available for meetings only for one client on these days, but I do some work for the other clients as well after the meetings.

In teamwork, I emphasize the importance of reflecting and adjusting to continuously improve performance. After each project milestone or challenge, I encourage the team to pause, evaluate what worked well, and identify areas for improvement. This reflective approach is like fine-tuning an instrument, ensuring we stay in harmony and adapt to changing dynamics. By embracing feedback and making necessary adjustments, the team becomes more resilient, agile, and better equipped to achieve our shared goals.

There's no magic recipe to stay on top of everything. It's important to realise that there're (usually) a limited number of people in Customer Support team and a number of initiatives, projects or problems to tackle, so prioritisation is key. Realising what's the main value-generation body of work that is aligned with the overarching business objectives will determine which problems to tackle first and manage expectations with the rest based on best endeavours.

You can leverage Project Management if you treat the task as a mini-project. The 3 questions at the end of a project are: What didn't go well? What went well? What did you learn or would do different? Start with the negatives to psychologically clear them away. Limit it to 3 things to prevent it being too negative. And then turn it to the positives, and learnings. Most of the learnings should be shared and socialized so the team can improve together. It helps each member of the team grow their skills & perform better. As a team, adjust processes as needed. Managers can also see where a person may need training, and identify a team member to coach them. Also as a manager you can be better informed for delegating the next task and project.