5 Ways TransitChat is just Better than Email and Teams

Talking with clients the thing that they often bring up is that TransitChat is a midway point to creating a better workflow. While at KCATA Tyler Means said to me,

| "I think that it is so smart that you are using email to get us to stop using email"

Which is true. I am using email to fight against the larger incompetents slowing down your whole office. I think more about your teams workflows than I do about coding and helping design out these workflows so that people can have better transit service at the end of the day is why I do what I do.

That being said I have heard plenty of people say "we are happy with email" or that "we just use Teams" to get our work done. While I think that is great I am building something so much more than what teams could ever offer and I think that is going to become apparent over the course of the coming months.

🔁 1. Multiple Complaints About the Same Issue

We hear all the time. "Well we get emails all the time about the same issue" Which is exactly why we created TransitChat Topics. Think of this as issues that you want to target on your next schedule change or maybe a repeat issue that keeps happening at a particular location.

These types of conversations are often coming in from different departments or avenues and they all need to be lumped together. They can often be when different parts of the team are jumping in to work on a problem. With TransitChat Topics your team can see all the things that have been said since this issue was first identified.

We often say that TransitChat is a "Submission to Solution" product meaning we help team group and solve problems and identify patterns. Grouping items together is the best way we have found to keep your staff's conversations and files organized to stay focused.

📤 2. Backing Up Conversations by Forwarding Emails as Attachments

Every time we showed off the "Forward to TransitChat" feature the first question was "How do I get my old emails in there?"

With TransitChat Email Backup, you can take your valuable information that has just been SITTING in your inbox folders waiting to be of use for the past 3 years to be imported into TransitChat.

Best of all, all the files, replies and profiles are automatically created when you import this info in. So regardless of whether the person has a login or is a part of you organization it will all get added to your agencies Inbox for everyone to see with dates and names creating a record that your whole team can search.

🤝 3. Cross-Department Collaboration

At agencies it is often joked about that every department has its own click silo. This silo often creates frictions that make it difficult to get things done, but hostility between departments. It is a non-winning fight really, with people's existing workflows in Teams or Email you could just CC everyone all the time, but what would be the point? Do you really think that anyone could read all of that.

With TransitChat, teams across departments can coordinate and understand when it is their turn to jump in and solve the problem on the project.

🧭 4. Flattening Communication

Right now one of the major features that we are working on is our "first" notification. We have been building this product for the past 5 years and this is the first time that we have decided that we had something that was worth sending to your team and interrupting their work. The reason for that is we know that the majority of work that is done in Transit is not done on the computer, but is simply a tool that you use to coordinate and keep tabs on issues.

With TransitChat Digests we are changing the way that you think about how your team keeps tabs. Everyone get the same email. Everyone is on the same page. Something small and succinct so that people can answer the questions:

• Who did what?
• What needs to get done?
• What are people talking about?
• How can I help my team?
• What wins can I point to?

Being able to keep this in your back pocket to address or plan out your daily or weekly teams meeting is basically an agenda to streamline your talking points when talking to staff or management.

📂 5. External collaborations with clients and contractors

A lot of the things that can be done in TransitChat doesn't even have to be logged in to do. Every message that you send in Outlook can be CC'd to inbox@transit.chat and this will setup your whole team for success. With a simple CC you can not only share across the whole team, but create a searchable record that has routes, stops, departments and assignments associated with it. Creating more than communication, it creates a living record of documentation.

Want to stop scrolling through Teams to find the file? Wish you could search for files by bus stop id?

Get some time scheduled with Walter or email hailey@gettransitchat.com