upboard.tools™

User Guide

Getting Started

If you haven’t got an Upboard account, go to the sign up page and provide your name and email address. You’ll get an email containing your PIN a few seconds later.

How to assume control of the Upboard for your store:

To access the Upboard app for your store, you’ll have to ask a manager or administrator to grant your account access to the correct store location. Once they have done that:

  1. Login at http://upboard.tools/login/. You will see the location(s) which you are authorized to access.
  2. Click Take Over to assume control of the Upboard for that location.
  3. Type your PIN and either press enter or click the Login button.

Using Upboard

Being familiar with the following terms may be helpful:

(On) Point
The person at the door, ready to greet the next visitor.
(On) Deck
The person next in line to be at the door to greet a visitor.
Front
An interaction between salespeople and a customer greeted at the door.
Be-Back (or BBK)
An interaction between salespeople and a customer who was part of an earlier, un-finished interaction.
Phone-Up
Any sales interaction via phone.
Interaction (or Interxn)
Pre-sale customer-to-employee communication, including fronts taken, be-backs, and phone-ups. A single interaction is usually associated with multiple sales people.

How to begin the day:

  1. Login to your store’s Upboard (see Assuming control of the Upboard).
  2. Click Add in the Header Menu.
  3. Begin typing a name, and you’ll see a list of people who work in the store you’re at.
  4. Click a name to have that person added to the board.

Once added, the order of the salespeople can be altered by drag-and-drop. Once you’ve added everyone who is currently working, click Start.

How to manage the board:

Record a new front:

When a customer enters the store and is greeted by the person who is on point, find the person’s row (displayed in bright green) and click Front. They’ll go down to the bottom of the board, and their row will have a new interaction attached to it.

Record a T.O.:

Use the T.0. select menu to choose the person who will be taking over the interaction. The interaction will disappear from the greeter’s row, and will instead appear attached to the T.O.-er’s row.

Record interaction data:

There are a number of pieces of information that should be tracked with every interaction:

  • Record which product category the customer is interested in (e.g., ‘Mattress’) using the Category select menu.
  • Record the amount of the sale.
  • Record whether a protection plan was attached to the sale (Prot. checkbox).
  • If all other data has been recorded, click Done when the sale has been completed. The interaction row will disappear.

Record a be-back:

Properly handling be-backs entails some manual work on the user’s part. Instead of trying to solve the problem for you, Upboard will provide you with the flexibility required for you to use your best judgement. Broadly speaking, there at two kinds of be-back situation:

Situation A: A salesperson greets their own returning customer at the door.

  1. Click BBK in the green row.
  2. If desired, you can move the person who is currently on deck to point by clicking that person’s Status select menu (far right), and clicking on Make Point.
  3. If desired, you can now set the salesperson who is handling the be-back interaction to unavailable (which will allow others to assume deck status).

Situation B - A salesperson greets a visitor and later discovers it’s a be-back for someone else.

  1. T.O. the interaction to the person who stands to receive commission for the sale.
  2. Click the interaction’s description label (far left, with the level down icon) to access the interaction editor.
  3. Check the BBK checkbox (and accept/cancel at the the prompt as you see fit).
  4. Add all salespeople who’d stand to receive a commission on the sale to the interaction.
  5. Sort the people such that the person currently with the customers appears last.
  6. Click Apply Changes.

Record a phone-up:

Phone-ups should be handled exactly like be-backs. If a customer calls to reach a salesperson who is currently on point, it is to be handled as in situation A, above. B otherwise.

For Managers & Administrators

This section helps sales managers, store managers, and organization administrators access reporting data and manage user permissions.

How to access sales data:

Upboard logs everything that happens on the sales floor in every store, so it’s the place to go to examine how the sales team is performing.

To see data from today’s Upboard:

  1. Login to the admin. You will see the location(s) for which you are permitted access.
  2. Click the Board Detail link for the location you’re interested in.

If desired, you can download the data as a spreadsheet by click the Download Spreadsheet link.

To see Upboard data from the past:

  1. Login to the admin. You will be forward to the Gardner-White organization dashboard.
  2. You will set the location(s) for which you are permitted access; click the Review link.

Now, you may click any of the time links in the calendar to see the board detail data for that day’s Upboard. Or, you can scroll to the bottom of the page to see the whole month in aggregate. Or, you can click the arrows are the top of the page, next to the month name to view data from other months.

How update users’ sales goals and delivered totals:

  1. Login to the admin. You will be forward to the Gardner-White organization dashboard.
  2. Scroll to the Members section of the dashboard, and use the search box to find the user.
  3. Click the Manage link under the user’s name.
  4. Type the amounts in the appropriate fields and click Save Changes.

How to set or update a user’s location:

Because users are not allowed access to information about stores other than the one in which they work, salespeople cannot specify their location themselves.

  1. Login to the admin. You will be forward to the Gardner-White organization dashboard.
  2. Scroll to the Members section of the dashboard, and use the search box to find the user.
  3. Click the Manage link under the user’s name.
  4. Set the correct location, and click Save Changes.

Within 60 seconds, the user’s name will be available in the Add drop-down menu within the Upboard app at the location you specified. The user will also be able to login to that location’s Upboard and assume control of it.

How to make a user a manager or admin:

Admins can control the level of access provided to other users (notice that managers do not have such control). By default all users are given sales-level access. To upgrade a user’s access:

  1. Login to the admin. You will be forward to the Gardner-White organization dashboard.
  2. Scroll to the Members section of the dashboard, and use the search box to find the user.
  3. Click the Manage link under the user’s name.
  4. Set the desired level of access, and click Save Changes.

Important note: Any admin can demote other admin accounts to manager-level or sales-level access.

How to create new locations:

Those with admin-level access can easily create new store locations, as follows:

  1. Login to the admin.
  2. Scroll to the bottom of the locations list, where the Create Locations form is located.
  3. Type in a short, simple name of the location (a city or road name).
  4. Click Add Location.

You can now set users’ locations to the newly created location, and they can access and control its Upboard in the usual way.

How to delete locations:

Those with admin-level access can easily delete locations. However, deleting a location does not destroy any of the data associated with it. Here’s how you do it:

  1. Login to the admin.
  2. In the locations list, click the trash icon () for the location you want to delete.

Q: What does deleting a location actually do?

A: It prevents users from creating new Upboards for that location, and prevents access to that location’s sales data.

Q: What if a location is deleted by accident?

A: Create a new location with the exact same name as before, and it will be as if it never happened. No data is lost.