Keep Your Meetings Productive and On Point with Zoho Meeting Agendas and Client Portal

A common struggle for leaders across all organizations is setting up and running effective meetings. While there are a number of good solutions for scheduling meetings, there is a severe drought in tools to aid organizations in structuring and executing meetings to keep them productive and track associated tasks identified in these meetings. What’s more, the recent prevalence of virtual meetings has created new challenges in running high quality meetings, especially for industries where face-to-face communication has been the mainstay.

In the age of virtual meetings and remote work, the very concept of “business meetings” is evolving to meet the needs of these industries, and new tools are needed to bridge these gaps in our remote business environments. 

Our Meeting Agendas extension provides key functionality to enable your organization to bridge communication gaps with ease. Such meeting components supported by the Meeting Agendas extension include:

• Schedule meetings easily from the CRM
• Stage meeting objectives
• Meeting notes and materials are viewable by participants
• Structured agenda to reinforce meeting flow
• Assign action items to attendees
• Send out action items to attendees following meeting completion to reinforce meeting objectives and assign additional tasks that arise in the course of the meeting

Does your organization have a need for improved communication, meeting organization and task followthrough? 

With the Meeting Agendas extension by Catalyst Connect you can instantly share deliberate and  organized meetings agendas with clients and coworkers. The Meeting Agendas tab enables convenient access to the Meeting Agendas module. 

Meeting agendas can be shared with clients as read-only or editable permissions. If provisioned, recipients can add their own documents and meeting notes to the module. Finally, Meeting Agendas makes it easy and convenient for organizations to store the recording of meetings for later review. 

The ability to set organized and coherent agendas for meetings is a critical task irrespective of industry. Let’s explore some use cases that highlight the unique problem sets solved by this functionality:

Use Case 1: CPA Firms

CPAs and accounting service professionals need to maximize every available moment out of their business day. There are a number of factors that can lead to efficient or ineffective meetings with clients, and the Meeting Agenda feature serves to tackle these problems at the source. As we follow the tax preparation workflow, the utility of Meeting Agendas becomes apparent. 

Client meetings can be planned in advance with set objectives and discussion topics. The meeting host can assign documents for review or action items for all attendees ahead of the meeting. All parties can come into the meeting understanding the necessary items for review, have quick access to relevant materials and assign action items from the same interface.

Miscommunications and misunderstandings are eliminated through meeting content– from meeting notes to recordings– being archived for future reference. Action items resulting from client meetings are automatically sent to participants directly through the portal.

Tax professionals can save time when meeting with clients by providing required document lists to clients ahead of the meeting. Clients can upload the documents in the same portal the meeting agenda is accessed from making it easily to pull up docs to discuss during the call.

Use Case 2: Law Firms

For any industry billing by the hour, there is a fiduciary duty to keep billable hours as productive as possible. Poorly organized or meandering meetings can sew ambiguity between parties and foster poor client relations– even the  appearance of poor accounting of billable time can have rippling effects on future business.

Meeting Agendas extension for ZohoCRM and ZPortals is an exceptional solution to this problem. Attorneys in nearly every corner of the legal profession have to maintain close working relationships with their clients and foster trust in the pursuit of providing legal services. This requires varying degrees of client engagement.

The Meeting Agendas extension serves to maximize the value of these engagements by ensuring a mutual understanding and shared expectations for  meetings and their outcomes, and to reinforce those outcomes along with any additional action items that occur as a result of the meeting. An informed, prepared and appropriately engaged client can make all the difference in conducting constructive meetings. 

With Meeting Agendas, attorneys can schedule client meetings with ease; specific case information and documents can be made easily accessible through the meeting portal so parties don’t have to go hunt it down and email to each other during a meeting.Clients are afforded the ability to download meeting items prior to the event, upload their own documents, and even securely sign legal forms and invoices when used in conjunction with Zoho Sign.  

The immediate benefits of this functionality go beyond client satisfaction and can have a material impact on overall productivity and output.

Use Case 3: Mortgage and Lending Firms

Whether applying for a loan for a house, business, car or something else entirely, the process requires a prolonged series of back-and-forth communication between lenders and borrowers. 

The consequences of wasted meetings due to unprepared clients or miscommunication between parties aren’t just costly to your firm and the client, they undermine trust in your organization which is potentially a company’s most valuable resource. In an industry where lack of client engagement is an untenable circumstance, organizational leaders have to be constantly looking for opportunities to improve communication and a shared understanding of exactly what specific activities are expected of all parties. 

With the Meeting Agendas extension, neither you nor your clients will ever miss a beat. For every meeting, participants can clearly see: the purpose of the meeting, materials needed to be prepared for the meeting, meeting objectives and outcomes, as well as the ability to share, download, sign and upload documents by utilizing Zoho Sign in conjunction with the CRM and Meeting Agendas.

In the event an applicant enters a meeting unprepared, they can actually complete their requisite tasks in real time through the client portal to keep the meeting on schedule and avoid rescheduling, which can reduce workflow disruptions and improve the customer experience. 

Use Case 4: Consultants and Business Coaches

Ensuring the quality of client engagement in meetings can be a difficult process. For consultants, as in many fields, clients’ unpreparedness in meetings or general misunderstandings about meeting objectives can cause unnecessary service delays and undermine the professional appearance of an organization. Imagine a client logging into a meeting expecting an update and  instead realizing they have failed to complete requisite tasks because of miscommunication.  Quality communication and transparency of meeting expectations and objectives are absolute necessities in maintaining relationships and providing quality services.

Meeting Agendas makes the process of scheduling professional and constructive meetings as easy as possible. Your organization can avoid the tedium of back-and-forth emails to schedule meetings by scheduling meetings using the Meeting Agendas tab in ZohoCRM, and all attendees have clear visibility of meeting agendas and expectations. 

Eliminate any ambiguity following meetings with Meeting Agenda’s automated follow up emails that detail action items and meeting notes. Meeting recordings can be archived for review or shared with clients so everyone is on the same page. 

Further elevate your client engagement through ZPortals, the unified client portal builder for Zoho and connect Zoho apps like Desk for support, sign for electronic signatures, books for invoicing, forms for client intakes and survey, analytics for dashboards and reporting and so much more. To learn more about using Zoho and Zportals to improve your client engagement, reach out to us or Catalyst Connect, a premium implementation partner.