Top 10 Benefits of Scheduling Your Day Using Dynamics 365 Calendar Plugin

Do each of your employees have their own calendar and Dynamics CRM task to create and maintain? If the answer is yes, then your employee’s productivity is being hampered by such repetitive chores.

Employees also frequently discover after scheduling a meeting that some of their coworkers have other obligations. Alternatively, the participants may be absent or arrive late even if a meeting is correctly scheduled. Your staff may feel uneasy in such circumstances.

If your staff has these problems, you need a calendar to keep their schedules organized and provide real-time reminders, so they never miss anything.

Calendar plugins simplify scheduling, rescheduling, canceling, and managing meetings. Here are some of the benefits of a calendar plugin:

• Available for all

Any employee of your company, in-house or remote, can easily schedule meetings and send invites. Using a calendar plugin, you will have access to meeting scheduling. These plugins are mobile-friendly, so employees are not bound to use their desktops or laptops to schedule a meeting. All the calendar functionalities are available on smartphones.

• Zero Errors

It is highly possible to make a mistake in the date or time if you manually schedule a meeting or just forget to enter the meeting in your calendar.  If you have numerous clients to meet daily, the chances of these errors arise. But with a calendar, you can schedule a meeting much easier. As a calendar plugin is integrated with Dynamics 365 CRM, it fetches all the CRM data. So while scheduling a  meeting, it becomes easy for you to invite users. 

• Saves Time 

If you do everything yourself, it might be a lot on your plate. Creating a task or assigning it to your team members is easy with a Dynamics calendar plugin. You can drag and drop the details as your calendar shows the data from CRM. You can color code tasks and meetings according to the projects. It becomes visually easy to find what you are looking for. 

As the Calendar is synced with the CRM, any updates or changes in the status of tasks can be easily done from the calendar. So, if you complete a task, you can change its status from the calendar, which will also reflect in the CRM. Thus, you don’t have to update the same thing at two different places.

• Avoid Meeting Time Conflicts

A lot of meetings get canceled or have to be postponed because invitees are busy with other meetings. This is a very common situation that a lot of employees go through. Just because of time conflicts, the meetings have to be rescheduled.

But what if the calendar warns you that the invitee you have selected will be busy in another meeting? Thus, the meeting organizer will know that the person is already busy in another meeting. Hence, they can check their availability and set the meetings at another time rather than canceling them at the last moment. 

• Provide the Best Customer Experience

One thing that sets you apart from your competitors is your relationship with your clients. For that, you need to smoothen the communication path with them and build their trust. A calendar can open new doors to improve your bond. Calendar plugins make the appointment scheduling process easy for your customers.

You can share your calendar with the clients, and they can book appointments with you. The link will show your availability with the time slots. They can choose their preferred time zone, and the timings will reset accordingly. Once they select a time slot and confirm the appointments, you and the customer will receive a meeting link with all the required details.

Customers appreciate the easy way to connect with you, which would help you build trust as they know they can connect with you easily. It also signals that customers feel it would be easier to work with you and would like to stay connected. Thus, hassle-free booking links are better than the long, boring forms that otherwise cause clients to abandon.

• Save Money

Processes like appointment scheduling are automated, so there is no requirement to recruit an admin staff who takes client call booking. Thus, no need for data entry and sending emails. All these processes are automated with the calendar plugin.

A calendar will show only the time slots you want customers to see. Once they confirm the appointment with a one-time slot, the calendar will block that particular times-slot for others. So, no conflicts in meeting timing so that you never lose an important call.

• Fulfills Different Requirements

Different departments in a company function in different ways. This means they would have different requirements. For instance, your sales team would have different requirements than the marketing or development teams. Hence, the calendar requires configurations based on user types to make the best use of it.

The calendar plugin has features that allow you to configure entities per your requirements. For example, the sales team can have attributes they need, like a list of leads and clients, whereas the development team can have testing, designing, etc., as their attributes. 

The plugins also allow you to save the calendar with different entities. Hence, users have the flexibility to choose the entities and save them for future use.

• Reminders

The calendar’s basic yet useful feature is reminders. Reminders are a must when it comes to reaching meetings on time. It is natural to forget a meeting if you have multiple in a day. No one likes to reach a meeting late or forget it at all.

This is why we need reminders. Reminders give users time to prepare themselves before the meeting and reach on time. Calendar plugins give the flexibility to choose the reminder time. The calendar sends emails and push notifications to notify the user about the upcoming meeting.

Furthermore, calendars also have different views, like list view, agenda view, timeline view, etc., for users to choose from. Users can also configure the calendar using different colors. They can assign colors to projects and tasks for better visualization. 

Sometimes, users complain that they have to open all the meetings to see the meeting details. But with the Dynamics calendar plugin, you can see all the details by hovering the cursor over the meeting, and it will show all the important details.

Additionally, they have different views for the calendar, making it easy to view all the tasks added to it. You can configure different colors for different tasks for better visualization. Also, when you hover over the meeting, it will show other details of the tasks.

• Calendar Sharing

Scheduling meetings with multiple invites is hard as you need to consider the schedules of all the invitees. It is time-consuming to ask all the invitees for their availability and then schedule a meeting. To avoid this, you can simply share calendars with colleagues using the calendar plugin. 

Thus, anyone organizing the meeting can view their calendar and then schedule a meeting. So, you don’t have to wait for responses from invitees on whether they are free or not at a particular time.

This works best for senior employees who are usually occupied in meetings. Their team members struggle to find the time when they can discuss with them. But if the managers can share their calendars with their teammates, it would be easier for the team. 

• Mobile-friendly

It becomes mandatory for daily planning tools to be mobile-friendly. Your employees might have to go out of the office for work. If the calendar app works on the phone, it would be easier for them. They can be right on their schedule without missing an appointment or task. 

A calendar would send them reminders of meetings or any upcoming tasks. They can keep the calendar updated from their phones if there are additional changes in meetings, events, tasks, etc. Usually, calendar plugins are not only compatible with mobile phones and tablets, web apps, and model-driven apps.

Wrapping Up

The Dynamics 365 calendar is a quick and easy approach to increasing staff productivity. You can monitor employee productivity based on the tasks an employee accomplished before the deadline. On the other hand, users can easily manage their tasks and activities and independently update the task status.

You can hunt for a business that offers a Dynamics 365 calendar plugin if you want to take advantage of all these features. After that, they will also assist you with the entire integration process. If you need to decide whether to buy the product, test it out for free for a few days to see if you enjoy it. This would guarantee that your money is being invested properly.

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