In BusinessChat, a Task is a lightweight, customer-driven follow-up designed to capture personal commitments made mid-conversation. While conversations focus on real-time messaging, Tasks serve as the dedicated tracking layer for work that an individual user promises to complete over the next day or two.
1. Core Properties of a Task
Tasks are intentionally lightweight by design, prioritizing speed and personal accountability:
One-to-One Contact Relationship: A Task must always be linked to exactly one customer contact. It is built specifically to track individual customer follow-ups.
No Extra Custom Fields: To keep creation friction to an absolute minimum, Tasks accept only a Title and a Description. They do not support custom field configurations or reference extensions.
No SLAs: Tasks are entirely informational organizational signals driven by user-defined schedules ; they do not support Service Level Agreements (SLAs) or automated breach alerts.
Manual Assignment Only: Tasks do not utilize automated routing or round-robin logic. They are always assigned manually to a specific user.
2. The Due Date: Your Primary Signal
Because Tasks lack formal SLA tracking clocks, the Due Date serves as the primary operational signal for self-management.
Any user with access to the work item can manually select a due date and time.
Automated Due Date Alerts:Contrary to typical informational flags, breaching a due date on an open task explicitly fires automated notifications. The exact moment a task's deadline passes, both the assignee and the creator instantly receive a targeted "due date passed" notification. This alert triggers once per deadline; however, setting a brand-new due date will arm the system reminder again.
3. Fixed Statuses and Lifecycle
Unlike Tickets and Incidents, which allow extensive customization of statuses and automated team-routing rules , Tasks utilize a strict set of standard statuses that users cannot edit, rename, or extend.
Tasks move cleanly through a simplified version of the standard five-stage lifecycle:
Submitted: The initial creation stage where a task is captured but not yet picked up. (Default status: New) .
In Progress: The active working state. (Default status: Working) .
Waiting on Customer: Used if you are temporarily blocked by a dependency on the customer's side. (Default status: Pending customer) .
Resolved: The final completed state. (Default status: Done) .
Canceled: Pushed here if the follow-up is no longer necessary. (Default status: Cancelled). Note that under the hood, the standard tasks status configuration provides 5 default statuses that admins can reuse or relabel across other custom work item types if desired.
4. Internal Collaboration & Activity Tracking
Every Task features the standard, team-internal discussion feed at the bottom of its page.
Practical Usage: While Tickets and Incidents frequently accumulate long comment threads due to multi-department handoffs, Tasks typically have zero or one comment because they are personally owned.
Flat History: If team collaboration is required, you can use @mentions to loop in teammates, which automatically subscribes them as participants to receive status-change alerts. The thread remains strictly flat with no nested replies.
Activity Log: Any updates made to the task's properties, title, description, or status are instantly recorded as flat, one-line system events in this feed.
5. How to create a new Task
For admins to create a new task type, or case, follow these steps:
From your profile's icon, click Settings
Choose Work items, and click Create new work item
Choose Task, add a name and emoji, and click Create
From the new window, customize your task by adding a task description for your team. Task description can include when to create and attach this task type to a customer conversation, and what to do when created. Note: Satuses here are pre-configured and cannot be edited or attached to sub-statuses.
Click Create
Understanding Tasks Reporting & Attributions
Because Tasks are manually assigned rather than automated, their reporting layer uses specialized metrics that differ entirely from Tickets:
First Assignee (Load-Bearing Metric): The "First Assigned" metric tracks who received ownership of the task at the exact second of creation.
This captures the initial administrative allocation of responsibility.
The Pass-Through Pattern: Managers can explicitly track your team's "Pass-Through Rate" by evaluating the divergence between tasks First Assigned to a user versus who actually Completed them. A high pass-through pattern flags instances where tasks land on an agent's plate but consistently get re-delegated to someone else before completion.
Task Effort Capacity: Active owned time is tracked in calendar days rather than business hours adjusted by default. The system aggregates "Active Time Owned" by measuring contiguous intervals where an agent held the task, excluding time spent in terminal states or Waiting on Customer status.