Hello everyone!

Sales activities provide more context for where each deal is headed, helping sales reps to focus on accelerating the customer journey and close the deal. That is why it is critical to capture all activities and monitor their outcomes as it allows you to look for ways to streamline the subsequent activities.

The Activities module in Zoho CRM helps you capture information about sales activities like Tasks, Calls, and Meetings in one place. As your sales needs grow you will need in-depth customization, workflow automation, data administration, integrations and detailed reports for tasks, calls and meetings. 

As new features are added, the existing Activities module will become complex and unusable. While it's easier for us to keep adding these new options to Activities modules it will deprive the user experience. Hence, to meet these requirements and offer a granular look at data in mind, we are introducing new tabs for managing Tasks, Calls and Meetings separately deprecating the Activities module eventually. 

Although, this change poses a learning curve for existing users, they can experience the following benefits:

Hide modules that you do not need based on the user profile 

A user can be given access to individual modules (Tasks, Calls or Meetings) based on the activities they perform. For example, you can hide the tasks module for the sales reps in your organization. They can be given access to only the Calls and Meetings modules. This lets you hide modules that are not relevant to the user profile.

Mass Update or Delete Records

As Tasks, Calls, and Meetings will be listed separately, you will be able to enable/disable the mass update or mass delete feature for specific modules. 

Unlike the previous setup where when a module access was disabled for a specific profile, the users could not mass update/delete records in the other modules also as Tasks, Calls, Meetings modules were combined under Activities. For instance, if Calls module was disabled for a profile then the user cannot perform mass update/delete actions in Tasks and Meetings modules despite having profile permission to access these modules.

Create reports associated with specific sales activity

Tasks, Calls, and Meetings will be listed separately in the related modules list of the primary module you selected while creating Reports. 

Previously, only the Activities module was listed here and users had to create a filter to customize the report based on the activity type. For example, you can now create a report for the Deals module showing the tasks associated with each deal directly.

Create dashboards

Create dashboards for Tasks, Calls and Meetings modules separately.

Previously, only the Activities module was listed here and users had to create a filter to customize the component based on the activity type.

Add sales activity based components to your homepage

In the homepage, users can add custom components for the Calls, Meetings, and Tasks modules individually.

Add activity-based components to Canvas view

Individual related list components like Open or Closed Calls, Open or Closed Meetings, Open or Closed Tasks are available in Canvas view in addition to the Open or Closed Activities related list. This helps you customize your record details page and displays only the related lists of activities that you track.

Previously, only Open/Closed Activities related list components were available.

Open/Closed Activities related list gets a revamp

i. Activities are now classified according to the activity type.

Previously, they were shown together as a single list.

ii. The related list can be customized to show fields that are specific to Tasks, Calls and Meetings modules.

Previously, module-based customization was not available. For instance, the field 'Call Purpose' is related to the Calls module but it was displayed for all activity types. With this update, users can customize the related list to display Call Purpose field only for Calls.

iii. Users no longer have to scroll horizontally to view all the fields in the related list. 

Now, the data is listed under each activity type.

So, what will happen to the existing Activities module?

For organizations that have signed up before Sep 10th, 2021

We will retain the Activities module and also show Tasks, Calls, and Meetings modules so that customers have sufficient time to adapt to the changes and also get used to using these modules individually. Eventually, the Activities module will be discontinued (we will announce the date later). Your data will not be lost and it will be available under Tasks, Calls, and Meetings modules. You will be informed well before time when the Activities module is taken down.

For organizations that have signed up after September 10th, 2021

Only Tasks, Calls, and Meetings modules will be available. Activities module will not be displayed.

However, for all organizations there are a few places where the Tasks, Calls, and Meetings will be grouped together to give better context to the user: 

i. Record details page (Open Activities and Closed Activities)

ii. Info section in the tasks, calls, meetings details page

And, that is not all – we have plans to introduce more exciting features, like task support in calendar, workflow for calls, customizing calls module, minutes of meeting and timezone support in meetings and many more features.

Stay tuned and watch this space for more updates.

Happy New Year!

Aayisha Siddiqua H

Zoho CRM – User Education