Picture this:
Ben, a business contact calls, and he’s upset. He’s upset because of an issue that he’s facing with the product. As it would typically happen, you schedule a web meeting at a time that Ben’s free.
What’s next? You would open up your CRM, schedule an event, and assign it to the best Customer Support Executive (let’s call him Peter) that you have in your team. You’re relieved. You’re confident that Ben’s problem would be solved, right? Wrong! The web meeting never happened. And why so? Simply because Peter wasn’t free at the time that you had scheduled the event.
Now what if it had happened like this?
Ben calls, and you promise a web meeting. He tells you a time that is convenient for him. While scheduling the event, you check Peter’s calendar to see if he’s free. You find that he isn’t and then assign the event to another person. Simpler?
The ability to check the availability becomes very important when it comes to Customer Service. After all, executives cannot attend to more than one customer at a particular time, can they?
Take a look at the Add Event section in Zoho CRM‘s new design. You can now check the calendar right before scheduling an event and you do not have to navigate away from the page either. We call this feature Check Availability.
“A localized Sales calendar” – this is what it means for your Sales Team. Data is available in a single place and there’s no overlapping of meetings or schedules.
Working as a team is a lot easier! Do you agree with me? Add your comments below.
This sounds ideal, however there is no option to "Block Out" certain time periods for users. due to days off, other engagements, etc which is currently on Microsoft Outlook. At the moment I don't see an option to sync with an Outlook calendar (or more).
First step in a long road of meeting sync and integration with the CRM.
Next required step - invitees meeting confirmation
Then -in Reports to add Activities to the "Select Related Modules" in accounts, contacts, cases, potential so we will be able to check how many web meeting Ben done in the last year and how many hours Customer Service invested in a specific case or contact
Thats great, but much more useful would be if the calendar worked like every ther where it shows graphically when a person is busy.In you example, there are 2 different half hour appointments that both show as taking 1 hour in the calendar graphically. If you had an all day appointment, it would be much easier to see if it showed that filling up all the space on the schedule. As it is, if I have something that starts at 8am and ends at 5pm, it will show as being from 8am-9am when looking at the image. This is useless and should be quite easy to fix.