Calendar 365 Plugin: A Better Alternative to Calendly for Dynamics 365 Users

Calendars have always been a must-have tool for businesses. You would not want to forget an intro call with your potential clients or want to create a bad first impression by joining the meeting late with your existing clients. 

When you are there on time, it makes your prospects or clients them, it will showcase your integrity. This is again an important part of customer satisfaction. 

A lot of businesses use Calendly for appointment scheduling. It is a standalone app with lots of features for appointment management and scheduling.

But could it be the best choice for Dynamics 365 CRM users?

Keep reading to find out the best scheduling app for Dynamics 365 users that can change the way you manage your clients and daily schedules.

Why businesses need an appointment scheduling app

Scheduling calls with clients the traditional way happened with a lot of back-and-forth of emails. It was a time consuming and monotonous process. 

Calls are a major part of any business. You might have an intro and/or demo call with prospects or a discussion call with prospects or may be existing clients.

Businesses need to take care of the needs of the existing clients along with the new leads. That is why businesses need a scheduling app to book appointments with clients or potential clients.

The scheduling feature makes the whole process easier. Let’s learn how this feature works.

How appointment scheduling features work

To let your clients/prospects schedule the appointment with you, you have to first analyze your availability. You can add your working hours or available hours to calendar 365. The hours are customizable, you can set different working hours for different days of the week. 

Once you define the available hours, calendar 365 will generate a shareable link. You can share this link with your team and with clients and prospects. The link is for both CRM and non-CRM users.

Once you generate the link, the next step is to sort different types of calls. If you don’t ask them what kind of call it is going to be, you will not be able to guess the duration of the call. To have clarity on the call length and the purpose of the call, you have to divide calls into different types. 

For example, you can have an intro call of 15 mins, a demo call of 30 mins, or a discussion call of 60 mins, etc. The type and duration of calls are totally customizable.

Anyone with your booking link will be able to select from different types of calls. Based on what type and duration of call they select, it creates time slots of that duration.

So, if someone selects a Demo call of 30 mins, the time slots of 30 mins (9:00-9:30) are displayed. These are formed based on the working hours you have entered. 

Customers can select available time slots, and their appointment will be booked. Both parties get the confirmation email, and the appointment time is saved in the calendar.

You can set some buffer time between the calls to prepare yourself for the next call or maybe for a short break.

Which is the best appointment scheduling app for Dynamics 365 users?

There are a lot of scheduling apps available in the market. Many businesses are using Calendly for appointment scheduling.

But there are a few challenges that Dynamics 365 CRM users can face if they use Calendly.

First and the major challenge you will face is with integrating your CRM with Calendly. You have to purchase third-party extensions for the integration. Thus, apart from Calendly’s paid plan, you have to pay extra for the integration and the total cost increases.

Secondly, when you use Calendly, you use it as one moretool. You might be using a lot of tools already. This will be an addition to that list.

So what should Dynamics 365 CRM users use? 

You can overcome both these major challenges by integrating a Dynamics 365 calendar plugin. The plugin integrates with Dynamics 365, eliminating the need to pay extra.

It adds all its features within the CRM. So you don’t have to use it as an extra app. This plugin is the best alternative to Calendly for Dynamics 365 users.

With its easy appointment scheduling feature, you get a shareable link for bookings. You don’t have to worry whether the prospects are CRM users. Any non-CRM users can also book the appointments.

4 Spectacular benefits of using the Dynamics 365 Calendar plugin

You not only get the appointment scheduling feature with Dynamics 365 Calendar plugin. It is loaded with so many advanced and fully-configurable features.

The plugin also offers three different types of activity management calendars.

Resource Calendar: You can handle your resources with Resource Calendar. Simply select teams and see the activities they are associated with. Using various filters, you can see more specific data. 

If you want to see employees on leave, you can do it with the help of activity filters. If you wish to see the ongoing, completed, or canceled tasks, you can filter the data.

Customer Calendar: The customer calendar is specially made to handle customer accounts and contacts. Customer data will be fetched from the CRM, and you can filter that data with leads, contacts, customer names,  etc. 

You can use different views that improve your visualization. Managers can see which resources are associated with which customer and what are the ongoing activities.

Entity Calendar: This is the custom calendar that allows you to choose from different CRM entities. You can save multiple calendars of the same entities with different filters like owner, customer, etc. 

You can see upcoming events and use more filters for better visualizations. Also, you can save these filters for future usage to avoid monotonous tasks.

Configurations: The dynamics 365 Calendar plugin is fully configurable. All the filters in the calendar are customizable. You can also offer user-level configuration. 

You can choose how many configuration rights you want to give to the user. You can restrict some configurations as well to avoid any alterations in data.

Final Thoughts!

For Dynamics 365 users, it is best to choose calendar as an integrable plugin with your CRM rather than using a standalone app like Calendly. You will save the cost of other third-party extensions, and all the integrations with your CRM will be smooth. If you are still wondering how this plugin would work, book a demo with our product expert for more information. It will help you understand the product in more detail!

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