The first step to successfully implementing your organization’s Zoho CRM is for the Administrator to understand best practices when it comes to setting up the CRM General and Personal settings. This first step is key to a winning CRM launch strategy because these settings will have implications down the road when using advanced Zoho CRM features dealing with lead automation and workflow rules..
Personal Settings are fairly straight forward and self explanatory with its use of general demographic user information. User roles and permissions however can go a long way in explaining how you intend your users to interact with organizational and other user’s CRM data. Users need to fill out their personal information accurately because this data is used when using CRM mail merge functionality within dynamic email templates along with round robin lead and task assignments. Locale information for instance, is important when considering CRM reporting and API integration. Custom fields for users enable CRM Administrators to add or edit user fields that can be used in reporting fields and is also used to leverage automation and assignments.
Company settings involve similar considerations as Personal Settings in your CRM setup. Basic Organizational demographic information is needed, such as time zone set up for different company locations and fiscal year setup is used for leveraging forecasting CRM features. Business hours and holidays should define office working hours and holidays to later enable CRM workflow rules based on business hours. Currency settings are useful for global organizations who use multi currency options in their world wide operations. Last but not least, Hierarchy settings are used by a company to determine if CRM users permissions are determined by their company role or where they stand in the company hierarchy. Complex and territory data sharing rules are determined by these settings so some prior thought should be given to how you want to set up your CRM hierarchy.
Whether you are going to use your Zoho CRM for “bread & butter” data collection and reporting or go deeper into its rich set of automation and workflow tools, getting started with proper user and company configuration details is a cornerstone of successfully implementing your Zoho CRM.