The Home Tab of Zoho CRM offers you a snapshot
of different aspects of your business progress. You can picture it to
be somewhat like a cricket scoreboard - where all the key metrics are
summarized and you get an idea of what's happened so far, and what's
the target, all in one screen?
Similarly, the Home tab is meant to be like your own scoreboard for your CRM activities.
Except, it's not just about a few metrics, but a lot more.
We are now going to take a tour of the Home tab in Zoho CRM, understand
what it's meant for and how to customize it for your business.
As a sales person, your every day focus
is on your immediate tasks at hand. In order to help with that
Zoho CRM gives you a Home page view that has 3 components by default -
Tasks, Events and Deal Amounts (sorted by stage).
So if you log into your CRM account, on the Home tab,
you will see three sections: "My Open Tasks",
"My Events Today" and "Amount By Stage".
This particular view is called the Classic View and it is not editable.
I repeat, the Classic View is not editable.
It's not editable because, once you start changing things there,
you'd not be able to go back to the default settings, and that might leave you
a little confused. Moreover, as the creators of the CRM,
we wish to ensure we give you a facility to keep a track of your important
sales tasks and schedule - so the Classic view is not editable.
That does not mean that the Home page cannot be customized.
You can still have your own version of the Home page via
a different view - called the User's View.
In this view, you can add up to 10 components and rearrange them.
This is editable at any time. Apart from these two,
there's a third and final view, called the Shared View.
So far what we looked at is with respect to an individual for
himself/herself. Apart from this your manager might
want you to keep a tab on a few metrics. So the Shared View
is something that a user's Administrator has shared with them.
The Admin can create a customized Home page, with
components that he/she deems ideal for his/her team - and then
simply SHARE this Home page with the relevant roles. This
Is called the Shared View.
So at any given day, you will see these three views
on your Home tab. The Classic view, which is the default view and non-editable,
the User's View, which is definitely customizable,
and then the Shared view, which is pushed to certain roles by the Administrators.
Let's look at a few examples: Here's a sales scenario, where
a user called Amelia has her three Home page views:
The Classic View - which is the default view with open tasks in her ownership,
similarly her events and deals by stage.
And next, we have The User's Home - That is,
Amelia's Home, where she has brought in a few more components that she feels are important
to her. Finally, Amelia's Admin has pushed
another Home tab view as Shared View to her. So Amelia and other
users on the same role as hers, will now see this view as well.
They can toggle between these views. Now let's move
away from sales - and go about another example.
Let's say a school uses Zoho CRM for their student
administration requirements. They have modules such as Students,
Teachers, Courses, Fees, Assignments and so on.
The principal of the school as well as the professors are all added as users
in CRM. The principal is the Super Admin - and is
in charge of the overall in charge of this account. We have the Teachers,
whose main responsibility is to keep a track of courses available,
and students associated to these courses, monitor whether
their assignments are on track, and so on. And then we have
the office admin team that oversees things like student enquiries,
payments and the like. So there are these
three roles now - Principal, Teachers and Office Admins.
When a teacher logs into Zoho CRM, they will see
their Home page with open tasks, events and deals. Deals
do not make sense, so they have hidden it here. A teacher can
customize their Home tab for themselves. So here is a customized view with
a dashboard on Current Courses and Students who did not complete their assignments.
So this is a Home page view that a teacher has
customised for himself/herself.
And then, a teacher will navigate to a third view, which is the Shared View.
where the principal has created a certain number of components
such as "Upcoming courses", "Evaluation table" and a couple
of other sections for that are relevant for the Teachers role. So the teacher is now
able to see the Classic view, which is not editable.
the customised view where they have added their own components,
and then a shared view, which the principal has shared with them. Similarly when an office admin
logs in, he/she will see the classic view,
And then their own customized view, and then the final Shared View.
Now this shared view is not going to be the same as that of the teachers.
Now this shared view for the office admins, is going to be a different
with a set of components such as Fee Defaulters,
New enquiries and other components that are relevant for
the office admin team. So what is shared now with the office admin team
is different from what is shared with the Teachers role.
So this is how your Home tab works. You can customize
components and you can also have a customized Home shared with others.
That brings us to another question — What are the components that can be
added in a Home page? They are,
Dashboard, Custom View and Widgets.
Dashboards are pictorial representations of your reports. These are what are available in your
Analytics module. This component can be brought in as a Home page component.
Custom views are nothing but a filtered set of
records based on certain criteria. These are module-specific.
That is, in the Leads module, you may have custom views such as
My leads, Recent Leads, Leads from
the October trade show, London leads and so on. These are each
filtered based on certain criteria. This list view can appear
as part of your Home tab. Apart from these, you can add widgets
created from external applications such as your official calendar
or customer heat map from your website and so on. To know
more about widgets, go to Setup > Developer Space
and read more about it by following the link that flashes on the screen.
So if you have widgets created,
you can add them to your Home page as well.
That brings us to the end of this session on customizing your Home tab.
To summarize, Zoho CRM presents a Home tab, for you to keep a track
of important factors of progress in your business. There are 3 types of
Home tab views: - Classic View - Customized View - Shared View
You may add dashboards and custom views as additional components in your
Customized Home page. So go ahead and start creating your own
Home page and ensure you look at the right components as you start your day
with Zoho CRM!