Welcome back to our blog series on my favourite CRM tips and tricks. Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM improves how you interact and do business with your customers. But are you using the system to its fullest potential? I’ve got you covered with another handy trick to make your day-to-day use of the system easier!
Tip #4: activity management
Creating activities is great, but to be effective, you also need to be able to manage these activities, seeing what activities need to be actioned and when they need to be actioned by.
One way to do this is within the individual timeline. Here, you can use the filter option to narrow down the timeline entries:
For example, we could navigate to an opportunity timeline and filter the entries to only show activities that are due within the next 7 days:
And this is what we would see:
Alternatively, we can view all activities within the 'Activities' area:
The Activities page provides several system views, allowing you to look at tasks only assigned to you, to people within your team and to view all activities (that you have read access to). The view can also be specific in only displaying a certain type of activity, for example only showing 'My Phone Calls', 'My Tasks', 'My Appointments' and 'My Sent Emails':
There’re two different viewing methods within the Activity area. The first, is viewing the activities as a grid. This is useful as it allows the columns to be filtered and ordered:
But if you want to have a visual representation of where your time is required, there is the option to show the activities within a calendar mode. If this option is not visible by default on the top menu bar, click on the more commands button, choose 'Show As' and then 'Calendar Control':
You will then be able to see your activities within a calendar view. 'Today' will be represented as a block of colour. Each of the activities will have an icon to denote what type of activity it is:
Each activity can be clicked into, where additional information is available to view. This will display the information that was originally added when the activity was first created:
The activity can also be updated here, meaning the description, date and time, and duration can all be amended. Upon the top toolbar, there will be an option to change the status of the activity, meaning you don't need to navigate back to the original record to mark the activity as complete:
This is a great way of being able to manage your time more effectively, being able to see what has been scheduled, when it has been scheduled for and being able to see those activity details.
Happy scheduling! Come back next week for a useful trick for creating views!
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