Effective appointment setting and calendar synchronization are critical for businesses using Insightly to manage customer relationships. While Insightly CRM is great for businesses tracking sales pipelines and customer data, many users find its native calendar and scheduling capabilities very limited. Because they are indeed quite basic.
This guide explores how to overcome common Insightly appointment setting challenges and create a seamless calendar sync system that integrates with your CRM workflows. We'll explain why you should do it, and how a scheduling tool like Zeeg can be used to fill the gaps in your Insightly setup.
Understanding Insightly's native calendar capabilities
Before exploring integration options, it's important to understand what Insightly's built-in calendar can and cannot do.
Insightly calendar overview
Insightly includes an integrated calendar that displays your Insightly events, tasks with due dates or start dates, and milestones. The calendar is accessible both in the web application and through the iOS and Android mobile apps, which provide a view of your own tasks and events.
For users with paid plans, Insightly offers calendar sync options with Google Calendar or Microsoft Exchange calendars (supported by many Outlook installations). This gives you a combined view of your Insightly items alongside your regular calendar appointments. You can also subscribe to the Insightly calendar feed in other calendar applications.
The web calendar interface allows you to:
- Filter the view to show or hide events, tasks, or milestones
- Display public events from other Insightly users
- Customize the color coding of calendar items
- Navigate between day, week, or month views
- Add new events directly from the calendar
Limitations and challenges with Insightly appointment setting
While useful for internal planning, Insightly's calendar has significant limitations that create practical challenges for businesses:
No meeting invitations or external scheduling
Insightly explicitly states that their calendar "is not designed to replace your main calendar application, only to supplement it.¹" You cannot schedule appointments for others or send meeting invitations directly from the platform.
No client-facing scheduling
There's also no client-facing scheduling functionality, meaning clients and prospects can't book time with you through a booking page or portal. As Insightly notes in their documentation: "Continue using your calendar application to send meeting invitations or schedule events for others. You cannot schedule an event for another user or invite others to an event in Insightly.²"
Limited integration capabilities
While Insightly can display events from Google or Microsoft calendars - and no other calendar apps included - , the integration is primarily one-way, focusing on displaying rather than advanced scheduling. This creates disconnected workflows where your team must constantly switch between Insightly and other calendar tools, introducing inefficiency and potential errors. Without proper integration, appointments made in external calendars may not be properly reflected in Insightly, creating blind spots in your customer interaction history.
Basic time zone handling
Events in Insightly display in your local time zone, but there's no automatic conversion for scheduling across different time zones. This limitation becomes particularly problematic for businesses operating internationally or with remote teams across multiple regions. The lack of automatic time zone detection and conversion can lead to confusion and missed appointments.
Time-consuming communication process
The inability to offer self-scheduling options means your team spends valuable time on the back-and-forth communications typical of appointment setting. This manual process typically involves multiple emails or calls to find a suitable time, reducing productivity and extending the sales cycle. For busy prospects, this friction in the scheduling process can even result in lost opportunities.
These limitations highlight why many Insightly users seek external scheduling solutions that can integrate with their CRM while providing the advanced appointment setting capabilities that modern businesses require.
How to improve your Insightly appointment setting system
To overcome these challenges, you need a strategy that enhances Insightly's native capabilities while maintaining the integrity of your CRM data. Here's how to approach this:
1. Check what are your scheduling requirements
Before implementing any solution, assess your specific appointment setting needs. And for that, there’s a few questions you might want to ask yourself:
- How many team members need scheduling capabilities?
- Do you require group scheduling or just one-on-one meetings?
- What types of appointments do you typically have?
- Do clients need to self-schedule, or is internal scheduling sufficient?
2. Explore integration options and choose your favorite
Insightly's open API and integration marketplace offer some different ways to improve your appointment setting workflow, as third party scheduling tools like Zeeg can also connect to Insightly through Zapier, creating a seamless data flow between systems.
You should look for a tool that has:
- Great integration with Insightly
- Customizable booking pages
- Automated reminders and notifications
- Team scheduling features if needed
- GDPR compliance for international businesses
3. Implement a connected workflow
The ideal solution creates a nice flow of information. Appointments can be booked in your scheduling system and they should automatically create or update records in Insightly. These changes will then reflect in your scheduling calendar, as client information should get synced without duplicate entry.
Benefits of enhanced Insightly appointment setting
Now that we’ve seen what you should look for, let’s pay attention to the concrete benefits this integration should give you:
Automated record creation and management
When someone books an appointment through your scheduling system, their information can automatically flow into Insightly. New prospects become fresh leads or contacts, while existing contacts get updated with new appointment details.
Complete customer interaction history
Each scheduled meeting becomes part of your client's history in Insightly. This comprehensive view shows when appointments occurred, what was discussed, and what follow-ups were promised, giving your team full context for every customer conversation.
Streamlined sales pipeline management
Moving leads through your sales funnel becomes more efficient with integrated appointment setting. As prospects book demos or consultations, their status updates automatically in Insightly, keeping your pipeline accurate without manual intervention.
Team coordination through shared calendars
When multiple team members handle different aspects of the customer relationship, integrated scheduling ensures everyone has visibility into upcoming meetings and past interactions, preventing communication gaps and creating a cohesive customer experience.
Automate your Insightly appointment setting: Choose Zeeg
One effective option for enhancing your Insightly appointment setting capabilities is Zeeg, a scheduling platform that integrates seamlessly with Insightly CRM. This integration creates a connected workflow that addresses the scheduling limitations within Insightly.
Why choose Zeeg as a scheduling tool
When you use Zeeg, you can say bye to the scheduling conflicts, the endless email chains to find a meeting time, and your calendar will start generating more leads. Not to mention the fact that your CRM data will be updated manually. But here’s a few more concrete things you’ll get with Zeeg:
- GDPR compliance: Full compliance with European data hosting, essential for businesses with international clients.
- Full calendar integration: Maintains native integration with multiple calendars, including Google, Microsoft and Apple Calendar.
- Generous free tier: Includes two scheduling pages, making it ideal for testing your Insightly appointment setting integration.
- Affordable pricing: As your team grows, pricing remains reasonable at $10/user/month for the Professional plan.
- Customizable booking pages: You can create branded scheduling experiences that match your company's visuals, while maintaining seamless Insightly integration.
But there’s more to it. With Zeeg, you’ll get a better event creation experience - once a meeting is created, that gets recorded on the right contact on Insightly side.
Insightly-Zeeg integration benefits
1. Enhanced event creation. Zeeg gets rid of this manual burden by automating the entire process. When clients book through your Zeeg scheduling page, the appointment details flow directly into Insightly. We’re talking about 24/7 scheduling, even when you're not working. And you can set buffer times between appointments to ensure adequate preparation, create custom availability rules for each team member, and even collect payments during the booking process – all features unavailable in Insightly's native calendar.
2. Improved time zone management. Time zone confusion can be quite a challenge for businesses operating internationally. That’s why Zeeg offers time zone intelligence that automatically detects each client's location. That ensures that both you and your clients see appointment times correctly, regardless of where either party is located.
3. Advanced team scheduling. Insightly's team calendar features focus primarily on visibility rather than coordination. Zeeg, however, provides robust team scheduling capabilities that transform how your organization manages appointments. Its round-robin distribution feature automatically assigns incoming meetings to team members based on availability or expertise, ensuring balanced workloads. For situations requiring multiple participants, Zeeg's collective scheduling identifies compatible time slots across multiple calendars. You can even manage resources like meeting rooms, with capacity limits for group events.
How it works
Once you've established the basic Zeeg-Insightly connection through Zapier, you can create more sophisticated workflows tailored to your business processes. While the integration is one-directional (from Zeeg to Insightly), you can develop nuanced automation scenarios that enhance your appointment management.
Specialized Zaps for different appointment types. Zeeg allows you to create multiple scheduling page types that can trigger different actions in Insightly. For initial consultations, configure a Zap that creates new leads in Insightly whenever someone books through your "Consultation" scheduling page. When prospects request product demonstrations, a different Zap can update existing opportunity records with demo dates and relevant notes. Support teams can utilize yet another workflow where customer support bookings generate specific task assignments within Insightly. By creating these specialized workflows for each appointment category, you ensure that every interaction follows the appropriate process in your CRM.
Strategic synchronization. When appointments are canceled in Zeeg, a dedicated Zap can update the corresponding record status in Insightly, adding notes about the cancellation and potentially triggering follow-up tasks for your team. This ensures your CRM maintains accurate records even when scheduling changes occur.
