June 22, 2011

How we manage our Support with GrexIt

Thats right - we use GrexIt for managing Support for GrexIt users. This is how we do it:

- We get our Support requests on our individual email ids. We tried making sure everyone mails support@grexit.com for help. That broke often, because some users are now used to communicating with specific team members, and like mailing them directly if they need help or face an issue.

- Our support@grexit.com email id auto-forwards to the whole team. Anyone from the team who decides to work on the issue tells everyone by email that he has taken up the item. If the request came individually to a team member, he usually starts working on the issue without bringing other team members into the loop if they are not needed.

- The person who starts working on the issue adds it to GrexIt with the label "GrexIt Support", and another label that shows who is working on this item. We just use a label with the person's name. So if I am working on an item, I'll just add another GrexIt label to it called "Niraj".

- After that we just continue the conversation with the person who wrote in to us over email, without keeping other team members in CC if not needed. GrexIt keeps track of the conversation and keeps a completely updated version of the conversation for access by all our team members.

- Once a support item is closed, the person working on the item goes into GrexIt and marks a label on it called "Closed".

- Any team member can go into GrexIt and view all the support items by looking at the label "GrexIt Support".

- They can also easily see which are the support items which are open, and who is working on them using our label filtered search feature.

Its really quick and effective for our small team. We can stay inside our email inboxes most of the time while getting the job done, and hey, isn't that Nirvana!

March 4, 2011

Collaborate better with email using GrexIt

If you work in a small group, you probably use email to collaborate. Its simple, quick, and very effective. But if you have been doing it for sometime, you'd have seen that there some key problems with doing that:

There is no one central place where all communication is archived over time. If a new member were to join your team, you'd be digging information out of your inbox and forwarding it to them.
Even when an email is relevant or useful to just one person in your team, you tend to CC it to a lot of other people so that they can find what was discussed later on. This leads to a lot of clutter in the inboxes of people who did not need the email when they received it. A typical example is a task that you assign to someone over email - it might not be immediately 'actionable' by anyone other than who you assigned it to, but you'd tend to CC a lot of people.
You can not assign tasks, mark them done, or attach tasks with milestones over email. And those are very important parts of managing any project.

Enter GrexIt. Here's what you can do with GrexIt which can help your collaboration run way smoother over email:

Add all important information which is relevant to everyone in the team and anyone who joins in later to GrexIt, from where they can easily access it later.
Send emails to only the people who they are immediately relevant to, and, add it to GrexIt. GrexIt keeps a copy of the complete email discussion, which anyone can access, anytime. For example, when you assign a task to someone, just send an email to that person, and also add the discussion to GrexIt. Your team can easily see who is working on what by checking the emails inside GrexIt.
You and your team can manage tasks and milestones very effectively using GrexIt's shared labels. For example, you can mark an email with a task assigned to a team-member called John with two labels: "Task" and "Assigned to John". John, when he finishes working on the task, can mark the task "Done" with a label in GrexIt. This is a great way to have quick, effective and really light-weight collaboration. You can learn more about GrexIt's labels here: http://grexit.com/help#labels

Give it a try, and write to us about what you think. Let us know if we can improve something, and we'd be very happy to do that.

February 8, 2011

Hiring better with GrexIt

A lot of us manage the job of hiring new people on our email. That keeps the process simple for everybody involved in the process. Email makes it very easy for your HR people, interviewers and operations staff to collaborate together to make recruitments happen.

But there are a few problems with using emails for this. The information regarding everyone who ever applied for a job at your company, and what happened with the person's application remains scattered in multiple email inboxes. There is no centralized history maintained of these applications and what was discussed between the applicants and the people in your company. This may lead to you being unable to come back to profiles you liked but could not hire when you received the application, or reconsider applications which might have been rejected in the past. You might lose what your HR team discussed with a selected candidate on email, which might actually be very useful later on.

GrexIt helps you tie all these loose ends with managing your hiring over email very easily. We suggest the following 'process':

The person who receives the job application on email adds the email to GrexIt. He can mark it with a label like "Hiring" in GrexIt, and may also add another GrexIt label to clarify what position or role the application is for.
The person who receives the application kicks off the internal discussion, and also continues the discussion with the candidate. GrexIt automatically keeps pulling all information from the email inbox, and maintains an updated version of the discussion.
The team can collaboratively manage the status of the application in GrexIt with labels such as "Shortlisted", "Rejected", "Come back later" etc.
Anyone can go to GrexIt and view all applications ever received, what was discussed with the applicant, and what was the status of the application by searching and filtering search results by labels.

Its really very simple, adds almost zero overhead to your existing process, and is immensely valuable. Try it out, and let us know if you have any suggestions.