Ability to deactivate the task player in Zendesk Sell

Beau, this is incorrect, at least in my instance. I have never clicked "Play tasks" and yet the Task Player pops up every time I go to perform a Task. I don't even see an option called "Play tasks" anywhere, so I'm not sure what you're referring to (although perhaps it doesn't exist in my company's implementation).

The Task Player is very inconvenient and cumbersome and it's causing me quite a few extra clicks for each task. I can see how it would be helpful for someone whose workday is largely driven by Sell Tasks but that's certainly not the case for me. Please make a feature that allows users to toggle the Task Player feature itself on/off.

Hi Liam and Nikita. I'm the Product Manager behind the task update. Thank you for your feedback!

With this update clicking on a task name redirects you to the object related to that task and opens up a task player. To understand your feedback better I would love to ask a few questions:

Nikita, why is the task player slowing down your team? Could you tell me exactly what is slowing you down?

Liam, similar question here. You're mentioning extra clicks - what do you have to click extra that you didn't have to click before?

Hi Jakub,

First of all congratulations on successfully launching this new feature. However, the majority of my team feels the task player is disrupting their workflow. Reason is for instance if you dedicate a certain time of your day for initial outreach (which we do under leads or contacts), deal follow up (under deals) etc the task player on top distracts from that, hence slows down efficiency because it a) either redirects the person to perform a task instead of what they were intending to do and b) makes them have to close it which is an extra click and added distraction

Overall feedback from me personally would be to have the taskplayer only under the "task" section and not visible for when working on leads, contacts, deals etc.

That being said in my opinion it's a valuable feature for the task section itself and I'm sure many teams find it very valuable, however, I'd be interested to learn if you'd be potentially open to making it optional, so giving us the opportunity in "Settings" to disable the task player.

Let me know what you think and if you have any further questions,

Best,

Julia

Hi Jakub,

The extra clicks were from closing the Task Player each time it popped up (2 clicks each time - click the 'x', then click 'Close task player'). Since then I've decided to simply ignore it to avoid the extra clicks. However, as Julia said above, it then becomes a distraction.

Thanks for reading.

Can you make the Task Player optional like it used to be? It takes up at least 20% of the top of the screen and is not useful at all. It is very annoying to keep having to close it all day long. This 'upgrade' is a total 'downgrade'. Please, please remove the Task Player!!

Hi @... ,

thank you for kind words and thoughtful feedback. We’re analyzing the feedback and I wanted to ask a few follow up questions.

You said “the task player on top distracts from that, hence slows down efficiency because it a) either redirects the person to perform a task instead of what they were intending to do”. Can you tell me more about it?

It’s only possible to trigger task player for a single task if you click on a given task on the task page. If someone does that our understanding is that they want to perform that clicked task, and users were always redirected to the object related to a task they click. Now we show the clicked task on the top of the screen to make it easier to act upon it, instead of user having to look for that task in the task widget. Once the task is completed via the task player, the task player gives a quick option to go back to tasks. Could you tell me how it disrupts your workflow?

Hi @... and @...,

thanks for your feedback. Could you tell me more why do you prefer to close the task player instead of using it to work on your task? Our assumption was that thanks to task being on the top it will be easier to complete or reschedule a task that was clicked on the task page.

Hi @...

Firstly, the task player does not update in real-time, eg when I check off the task on the company or contact page, the task player above still shows it as open. Now I additionally have to check it off in the task player (which does not add value but eats time), If I then check it off in task player it does not provide any value other than redirecting me to the task overview - thus taking me off the contact/company page. 

Overall for my team, we feel this is disrupting the workflow for the above reasons rather than supporting it. The task section is completely sufficient for this.

I would highly appreciate this feature being optional - any thoughts on that? As a temporary workaround, I have resorted to using Asana and my calendar for task management more than ZDS. Ideally, I'd love to keep them in ZDS. 

Looking forward to your feedback and have a great day :) 

Hi Jakub,

The Task Player was never a feature that I found to be of benefit. It used to be optional, but now it keeps popping up, consuming about 20% of my screen, which was very distracting. It takes 2 clicks to close this every time and consumes so much time. If I found the feature beneficial, that would be no problem, but it is not a needed tool, so therefore it being there has turned into an irritate all day long.

If you can make it so those who don't wish to use it can turn it off or disable it, that would make the whole Zen tool far more zen.

Hi @..., @..., @... and @.... Thank you for your feedback, it informed task improvements that we released today. They are:

1. Ability to open tasks in new tab by right-clicking on the task name or secondary information below the task name.
2. Clicking on the secondary information below the task name does not open the task player. You can use this method if you want to avoid using task player. See how it works here. If you click on the task name (or the whole task row) the task player will still open, as a lot of Sell users adopted this feature since we released it. 
3. If there's only 1 task in task player, then closing it doesn't require additional confirmation. This is available for some accounts today and will be fully available tomorrow. 
4. Some minor styling changes were introduced, for example the secondary information colour was changed from black to grey to make the whole task page feel lighter. 

Hi Team,

For us it is also a feature that we struggle with. Popup window is appearing constantly and making some of my teammates less effective. 

The best would be to be able to switch this feature off for some users.

It would be great if we had the option to completely remove the task player feature from our account.  Since it popped up a few months ago, it's been very inconvenient.  It adds extra steps to completing a task.  If you don't want the player to "play", you can exit out (extra step). Once you've completed a task, it still pops up at the top of the screen in the task player because you didn't "play" the task player initially.  Sometimes it shows the accurate status, sometimes it doesn't. If you update the due date, it still shows as active in the player.  And it won't go away.  Every time we log in, there it is again, even if we x'ed out of it the last time we were logged in.

We really are not a fan of the feature and it's not useful to us.  I can see how it would be useful to some other customers who are largely task driven and just go through the sequence of tasks as they pop up.  But for us, what we liked about Base (now Zendesk) is its simplicity.  There are a lot more complex CRM's out there, but we wanted something simple and easy to manage.  Features that you can't turn off and aren't useful are frustrating.  PLEASE just have the option to Turn Off task player for our account.  Thanks!