Planning and scheduling is important when it comes to business meetings. A well conceived plan goes a long way in bringing positive results whereas, properly scheduled meeting can complement your planning.Businesses attend meetings for various reasons and also hold meetings of different types -In-house seminars, networking events to engage with customers, dinner or lunch meetings, charity functions and fund raisers, webinars and trainings for customers, board meetings and monthly team meetings, product launch parties to create a buzz, press conferences, trade shows, etc.
Having to keep track of all these in a note pad is definitely not a solution. Calendars are the right choice that shows you the list of meetings by day, week and month. Marking your meetings and calls in a calendar, helps you track the upcoming meetings and calls that are scheduled. Most importantly, it gives you an idea of what is lined up for the day and how your week is going to be.
While working with Zoho CRM where all your customers' details are available, you can make use of the built-in calendar for plan your meetings and schedule calls.
- Create recurring meetings that would take care of automatically scheduling weekly or monthly meetings.
- Set up personal preferences for reminders, working hours, holidays, cooler coding meetings etc.. to suit your convenience.
- View calendars of other users based on the organizational hierarchy.
- Import meetings from another calendar and also export meetings from Zoho CRM's calendar.
- Accept meeting invitations from other users.
- Make calls directly from the calendar.
- Get a clear picture of the day's, week's and month's meetings and calls.
Set Calendar Preferences
Before you start using your calendar, set up your preferences, such as when you want reminders of the meetings, what your working hours are, whether you want to hide meetings that you are not attending, the default duration of meetings and calls, etc. These settings are applicable only to your calendar.
To set calendar preferences,
- Access Calendar
from the utility bar of your Zoho CRM. (Location in your CRM: Lower-left section)
- You will land on the primary view of your calendar. Click Options > Preferences. (Location in your CRM: Top-right corner of the calendar)
- The preferences page has about six sections you can set preferences for: Select Activities, CalDav Access, Manage Unavailability, Color Coding, Reminders, and Notification.
- Under Select Activities, enable or disable the activity types: Meetings, Calls, Tasks, and Appointments.
If you have disabled a particular activity, you will not be able to create or view a calendar entry for that activity. - After you have selected the activity type, you have the preferences to choose from:
- Days in week view: You can choose to view all days in the calendar or just keep the days your business is open by choosing the following options: All days, Exclude closed days.
- Week starts on: Choose the first working day of the week.
- Day starts at: Specify the time your day starts at work.
Note: If you create an all-day meeting, the reminder options available are On the day of the meeting, 1 day before the meeting, 2 days before the meeting and 1 week before the meeting. The reminder time will be an hour before the time the day starts. - Day ends at: Specify the time your day ends at work.
- Weekly Holiday 1 and Weekly Holiday 2: Specify your weekly holidays. It can either be Saturday and Sunday or any other day of the week.
- Select the Default meeting duration and the Default call duration from the respective drop-down lists.
For calls, this is important as based on the approximate time when the call will get over, your availability to attend other calls or meetings can be identified. - Hide meetings___ day(s) after they've passed: On selecting this checkbox your meeting will not be available in the calendar after the specified number of days.
- Hide declined meetings: If you decline a meeting, you can choose not to have it in your calendar by selecting this checkbox.
- Show week number: Check this option to display the week number in the day, week, and month view of your calendar.
- Under the CallDav Access, enable the toggle to activate the protocol. You can also verify the configuration details for your reference.
- Under the Manage Unavailability, choose the products to synchronize events from. When the synchronization is enabled, events from the respective products will reserve your schedule in your calendar and mark that event time to be unavailable in CRM. This synchronization will benefit scheduling in Zoho CRM.
You can synchronize events from Zoho Products and Other services. - Upon hovering over the products, you can also manage the events you want to synchronize for.
- To manage synchronization of events from other services, click on Manage in Marketplace.
- Under Color Coding, click the Customize Meeting Color button to invoke the field color customization page.
Note: Meeting color preference is applicable only for that account and will not affect the organization’s preference. - In the Customize Field Color page, select a desired color for each meeting field available.
- Click on Set to default color to revert to the system-default colors.
- Under Reminders, select the desired reminder intervals for meetings, appointments, and all-day meetings.
- Select the turn off reminder via email to manage reminder notifications from your mailbox.
- Under Notifications, select when you’d like to notify for meetings and appointments. The options are:
- Notify me when a Meeting is assigned to me.
- Notify me when a Appointment is assigned to me.
- Click Done to save your preferences.
Note: These preferences apply only to your account and doesn’t get applied to the organization.
Note:
- For options and events with respect to Appointments, you need to enable the Service and Appointments module in Zoho CRM.
- When you access other user's calendar, and the Holidays do not match, automatically all the 7 days of the week will be available in the calendar, irrespective of the calendar preferences of either user.