Follow Up Activities with Outlook Calendar
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Tuesday, August 07, 2012 8:20 PM
Hello,
We're using CRM 4.0 and trying figure out a way to sync follow up activities to the Outlook Calendar. For example, if there is a quick campaign of leads distributed as phone calls, and a salesperson wants to 'follow up' with a particular lead, he/she would click the "Follow up" button, the tab would open on the right hand side, input all the information, e.g. "Call this person back next week" and save. This then saves in their activities, but most likely that person will forget unless prompted by a reminder. Ideally, it'd be great if these activities could show up on the Outlook Calendar once saved; this way, it would serve as an additional reminder to the salespeople.
The confusing thing is that the methodology works the other way; if you set up an appointment in CRM and click "track in CRM", it shows up in your Activities. But when the salespeople are spending most of their time going through distributed phone calls/marketing lists, it seems that it's easier to set up a follow up when you have the contact/lead open. I've tried all different combos of saving the activity as an appointment, phone call, email (quick campaigns won't let you save tasks for some reason) and I haven't been able to get anything show up on the Outlook calendar.
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated, and thank you for your time.
All Replies
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Tuesday, August 07, 2012 8:33 PM
So it should be doing what you ask. Those activities should list the salesperson as the owner, and then sync back to Outlook through the Outlook client. If they are Appointments, they'll go to the calendar, and if they're phone calls, tasks, etc, they'll sync to the Task List in Outlook. You likely need to make sure they put a reminder on the follow-up, either by educating them to open the follow-up and put a reminder time, or via workflow to add a 15 minute reminder to all activities that don't have reminders.
Now it can take up to 15 minutes to push back to Outlook, so when testing this, either make sure you force the update to see the Task/Calendar Appointment, or wait the proper amount of time.
If this still doesn't work, you might want to check out your CRM error logs, because something isn't working.
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- Marked As Answer by jab5322 Tuesday, August 07, 2012 9:52 PM
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Tuesday, August 07, 2012 9:54 PM
Thanks, Wayne!
I guess we were just expecting it to show up immediately. It is as you described, after 15 minutes the appointments come through on the Calendar and the phone calls/tasks sync with the task list. Thanks again so much for your help!
