When I do an Act to Zoho conversion for one of my clients the first thing I am often asked is “Where Are My Act Groups?” As the name implies, a group is a collection of contact records. The Act Group can be populated statically (manually) or dynamically (automatically). I’ve often discussed how much I love Act’s Dynamic Groups – and how much I dislike Act’s Static Groups.
There’s no doubt that, whatever the methodology, Act users love their Act Groups and panic when they can’t find them when they move to Zoho. First of all, when I do an import from Act! I create a field called “Group” and populate it with all the groups a contact was a member of in Act!. And yes, you can easily do a search in Zoho to find all the members of your Christmas Card group! Moving forward, you can continue to use that group field, or even explore Zoho’s “tag” functionality that allows you to mark records “on the fly.” However, you moved from Act to Zoho for a reason so you just might want to explore an awesome Zoho feature: Custom Views.
A Zoho Custom View is a combo of a Dynamic Group and a Customized Contact List. You create a query (for example, all of your Contacts in Omaha that you haven’t called in over a month) AND indicate the fields you want to display. And yes, you can “tweak” Custom Views along the way. As an added bonus you can add the Custom View to your home page by turning it into a dashboard component.
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