How Support & Product Teams at Calendly Save 10 Hours Every Week

How you communicate within your company depends on things like your size, your industry, and your tools. Small startups might talk across the kitchen table to each other. Titans of banking have guidelines on how to share information with other teams. But how does a smaller company—that isn't a startup or a Fortune 500—improve communication?

Online scheduler Calendly wanted to answer this question. Their teams communicated with each other, sharing information and requests, but it was inefficient. The tools each team relied upon didn't sync with each other out of the box. "We had to transfer all data manually across teams and departments," Kate Riney, Brand Storyteller at Calendly, explains. "It left room for forgetfulness, mistakes, and wasted valuable time."

Calendly needed to get their tools communicating as well as their team. To accomplish that, they use app automation tool Zapier to bring their tools together. Learn how Calendly gets apps like Zendesk, Airtable, Gmail, and Salesforce to talk to each other with Zapier.

Connect Your Teams Through Zendesk

Zendesk houses a lot of the information Calendly shares to different teams. In addition to housing their knowledge base and support requests, Zendesk gathers customer feedback and tags new leads for Calendly. With a couple of Zaps (a bridge between two or more apps), Calendly automatically connects their support team to product and sales.

While your company might have a specific form the product team uses to gather feedback, customers don't always have access to it. Instead, they use the channels that make sense to them: Social media, email, support tickets. When Calendly's users submit feedback through an unofficial channel like these, it lands in Zendesk.

But since most product teams don't operate within Zendesk, Calendly built a Zap to send product feedback to Airtable. When support sends a ticket to a specific view in Zendesk, Zapier instantly adds that ticket to a row in Airtable.

"Support now has an ongoing feedback loop with the product team," Kate says. "They convey customer information from the frontlines, which improves the product and provides satisfaction to our customers."

For their sales team, Calendly found a way to keep potential leads from cluttering up the support queue: Automatically email the new leads to sales. To do this, Calendly pairs Zendesk with Gmail in a Zap. Just like with their Airtable Zap, when support moves the ticket to a specific view in Zendesk, Zapier sends an email to Calendly's sales team.

When the sales team responds, they're now sending a direct email to the potential lead. The Calendly team doesn't just stop there. With another Zap, support sends potential leads to Salesforce, where the sales team can manage them.

With Zapier, cross-team communication happens instantly. Since Calendly's teams aren't wasting time manually entering or transferring data, their support, sales, and product teams don't have to worry about how to send information from one team to another. Instead, they can focus on solving more tickets and closing more deals.

All images courtesy of Calendly.