We all know calendars can help us plan our days more efficiently. But managing a calendar can take a lot of time from your schedule. Usually, companies use CRM to manage their workforce and projects. Employees have to create and update task status in CRM on a daily basis. Now, if they want to manage their calendar in a calendar, they must repeat the same process of creating and managing tasks. This procedure consumes a lot of their time, and as a result, they avoid using calendars for tasks. But, if the calendar is integrated with the CRM itself, they would not have to go to two different places to update the task status. As the calendar is integrated with CRM, any changes or updates in one reflect in another. The plugin that adds such features to your CRM is Dynamics 365 Calendar. First, let us understand the Dynamics 365 calendar and reasons to choose Dyanmics 365 calendar for your business.
What is the Dynamics 365 Calendar?
Dynamics 365 Calendar is a plugin that integrates with the Dynamics 365 CRM. It simplifies managing and scheduling meetings, appointments, and activities. It becomes easier to keep track of ongoing and scheduled tasks. Daily activity planning becomes easier with Dynamics 365 Calendar. To know more reasons to have a calendar integration, keep reading.
Why is Calendar Integration With CRM Important for a Business?
Integrating a calendar with CRM reduces the efforts of managing two different tools and reduces repetitive tasks. It is loaded with features that ease out the management part. Let’s have a look at some reasons.
1. Easy Meeting Scheduling Process
Scheduling a meeting can be a challenging task in many ways:
# Negotiating time and date with the participants
# Finding and finalizing the participants
# Guaranteeing whether everyone will join or not
The one scheduling the meeting often faces these above challenges. It consumes a lot of their time.
The one scheduling the process has to copy data from the CRM, add it to the calendar, select the date and time, and enter the meeting details. It is a long process, and sometimes they might add the wrong details or add wrong participants. Someone might miss an important conversation if the fault is not recognized earlier.
The Dynamics maps have solutions for all these challenges. The calendar is integrated with the CRM, and all the CRM entities are visible and can be used in scheduling the meeting. Just drag and drop the entities you want, color code them for better visibility, and resize them. It reduces all the back and forth between comparing the data with the CRM and adding it to the calendar.
2. Real-time Reminder
Even after scheduling the meeting after all the struggle, some of the participants do not appear at the time of the meeting. You might have to call them, and they would say they forgot about the meeting. It can be embarrassing to arrive late at a meeting.
Everyone has a busy schedule, and sometimes it can slip their mind. To ensure these things do not happen to any of your employees, you can integrate your Dynamics 365 to the calendar. The calendar would send notifications before the meeting so that they can prep up for the meeting.
You can also set reminders for client calls, specific tasks, meetings, appointments, etc., to never forget any task. You can also plan your daily schedule with Calendar 365, which takes us to our next point.
3. Daily Task and Activity Management
Calendars are not just limited to scheduling meetings! They can be the best way to manage time and make the best use of your productive hours. But many organizations avoid using it for daily planning as they have to create and update tasks at two different places.
For example, a company uses a CRM and calendar as two different tools. If their employees wish to plan their day in the calendar, they have to create and update tasks in the CRM along with the calendar.
Adding tasks to the calendar would take time and give no clarity on finished and unfinished tasks as the calendar is not integrated with the CRM. It would be maintaining the same data but at two different places. It consumes the time of employees. And that’s why they refrain from this daily planning thing.
But the Dynamics calendar turns out to be a game changer. The employees can create and manage tasks from the calendar itself. Any change in the task status would reflect in the CRM as well! So, no more managing things at two different places. This is possible because the calendar is integrated with the CRM; they work as one.
4. Share Calendar With Team
How difficult is it to meet the senior management? Even though you want only 5 mins of them, you must figure out the gaps between the meetings to meet them. This is one scenario.
The other scenario is of teams working remotely. When teams are remote, what sufferers the most is internal communication and clarity in work. The team members do not know what others are working on, and in case they wish to communicate with others, they usually get late or no replies. The reason was that they were either busy in a meeting or on leave.
If you want your team to work as a team or do not want to waste days for that 5 min talk with your senior, Dynamics calendar integration is the best solution.
It allows all the users to share the calendar. Seniors can share with all the employees in the hierarchy so that they can know when they will be free. Similarly, the calendars can be shared within the team. It gives an idea of who is working on what task and whether they have completed it or not. Additionally, it becomes easier to communicate within the team.
5. Multiple Calendars to Differentiate Tasks
Reasons to choose dynamics 365 calendar is to have clarity in the schedule and not to mess up calendars with too much stuff. Let’s say you have a client visiting your office and have to plan a schedule for them. If you add all these details to your calendar, it would lack clear results when tracking your performance.
As per your designation, you might have to plan schedules for visitors, new joinees, guests, etc.; you cannot add all those details to your calendar, or else it would mess up your tasks and schedules.
Dynamics 365 maps allow you to create multiple calendars and save them. So create as many calendars as you want for any individual. No details would mix up, and it would be easier to manage your and their schedules.
6. Multi-language Support
Remote work opportunities are increasing, and it is highly possible you have teammates from different states and countries. And it is possible they are not comfortable enough with the language of the tool you are using. They might be able to read what is written on the tool but might not be able to understand it.
The calendars are supposed to make handling daily tasks easy and not challenging! But thanks to the multi-language feature. The users can choose the language of their choice. Thus, no matter how diverse your team is, everyone can use the calendar to its fullest.
7. Mobile Compatible
You or your employees might have to go out for meetings. Viewing or managing calendars on laptops when you are out is not practical. The purpose of the calendar is to plan and follow the schedule. It has to be mobile compatible, or it would not serve its purpose.
Luckily, the Dynamics calendar is compatible with mobiles. If not laptops, the employees would have their mobile phones with them. They can view and manage the calendar from their phones as well. These tools work the same as it works on the desktop, without any compromises.
8. Easily Manage Work Reports
At the end of the week and month, leads are busy making and analyzing work reports. If all your and your team’s activities do not have digitized records, then the reports granted may not be accurate. You might not be able to recognize and appreciate your team’s work.
But with the Dynamics calendar, you have a record of the daily schedule of all your team members. You can see how many projects they have worked on, the task status of those projects, the number of working days and leaves, etc.
Final Words
So, these were some of the important reasons to choose dynamics 365 calendar for your business. The simplest way to streamline your and your team’s schedule is Dynamics 365 calendar. It fetches CRM entities, making appointment and meeting scheduling easier. The CRM and calendar would have the same task status, reducing any confusion. All you have to do is find a calendar plugin that serves all your business needs. You can also ask the service providers if you wish to customize any features or add some. You can subscribe to the yearly plan, and the prices depend on the number of users.
