How UltraCamp uses AI to build thoughtful customer connections

The folks at UltraCamp know how to have fun. 

The company headquarters in Niles, Michigan is basically an indoor playground. There's a rock climbing wall, a foam ball pit, even a laser tag arena—all the playful details you'd expect in a company providing management software for camps and retreats. 

The UltraCamp team also knows that keeping camp programs alive requires lots of not-so-fun admin work. Since 1998, they've simplified that work with software that manages everything from contracts and registrations to health information and parent communication. 

"[Our team] has a lot of camp directors that are very passionate about camp," says Spencer Mroczek, a Digital Experience Strategist at UltraCamp. Still, passion can only go so far with a small team. That's why his job is to ensure every digital touchpoint between customers and the business is as efficient as possible…without sacrificing the human touch.

How UltraCamp uses Zapier and AI for customer success

"Our software's greatest strength is our customizability," says Spencer. "Customizability often means complexity." 

UltraCamp was already using Zapier to automate internal operations, but Spencer saw an opportunity to use AI to solve some long-standing challenges. 

"The ability of AI is really to do the drudgery work," he says. 

Spencer says his team researched and discussed AI thoroughly before deciding where to implement it in the business. After all, UltraCamp's customers typically work with children.  

"There's definitely a difference between using ChatGPT [in the chat interface] and using Zapier," he says. "Definitely do your research and have conversations with the right people."  

The result: UltraCamp adopted a set of AI use principles to disclose where it uses AI, and where it draws the line. For example, there's no training on personal data, nor will you see AI-generated camp images. Instead, UltraCamp uses Zapier with several AI tools to solve challenges across customer support, sales, and marketing.  

 Jump ahead:

• Personalized training documentation

• Onboarding sales reps with real-world examples

• Creating and repurposing social content

Personalized training documentation

Onboarding is critical for customer success, especially when implementing new software for your business. UltraCamp's customer success team spends the first month helping new customers implement and use the platform. And a year later, they'd have to do it again. 

"We often had retrainings," Spencer says. "Setup can be a lot for anyone to absorb in a month's time." 

UltraCamp tackled the issue with a Zap that uses AI to transform training call transcripts into tailored documentation for customers. The information is then sent to Zendesk for the customer success manager to assign.

"Customers can see the documentation for their specific setup, all automated." says Spencer. "It just happens." 

Onboarding sales reps with real-world examples

UltraCamp's sales team faced the same issue. New sales reps have to absorb even more product knowledge in a short period of time to run successful sales calls, and the business depends on them to close deals.

Spencer worked with the sales team to develop an experiential training approach. Now, whenever sales trainees shadow demo calls, they receive an AI-generated quiz after the call. The quiz uses the call's transcript to ask applicable training questions, like "How did Jeremy solve this problem?" 

The result: Sales trainees get up to speed faster and make the most of demo calls, thanks to personalized quizzes that reinforce knowledge. 

Creating and repurposing social media content

UltraCamp doesn't have a social media specialist. Instead, most of the content marketing falls on UltraCamp's Vice President of Customer Engagement. 

"She often views different websites and needs to create content for [different platforms] based on what she sees," Spencer says. "I saw something similar from HubSpot called the content remixer. I figured I could do something similar but cheaper using Zapier."  

UltraCamp's content remixer is a single Zap that creates five pieces of content from a single URL, all written with the company's target audience in mind. 

Here's how the Zap works: 

• Capture the URL address: With just a single click from the Zapier Chrome extension, the content remixer Zap is triggered, capturing the webpage URL and any optional information provided. 

• Parse the webpage content: Then, Web Parser by Zapier takes the URL and extracts the title and page content. 

• Generate headlines and SEO excerpts with ChatGPT: Spencer uses two separate ChatGPT steps to create headlines and SEO excerpts. This makes it easier to write the prompt and ensures ChatGPT doesn't get confused. 

• Create platform-specific content with Anthropic (Claude): The Zap uses a separate step for each type of content, such as writing a Facebook post or newsletter. This also gives you more flexibility with the model to use. "Typically for writing, I do prefer Claude," Spencer explains. "For whatever reason, [Claude's latest model] Sonnet 3.5 writes social posts like a TV ad. So I use Opus instead. It's important to test your model and prompts in Zapier."

• Add the content to a new Google Doc: Then, the Zap adds all the generated content to a Google Doc. "These posts are probably good enough where it would actually be decently safe [to publish these as-is]," Spencer says. "It does depend on the person's personality, though. I tend to like control."

• Email the document to the VP of Customer Engagement: Finally, the content remixer Zap sends the Google Doc URL to the VP of Customer Engagement via Email by Zapier. From there, she can edit the content as she likes and post it.

For Spencer, writing the prompts is the most difficult part. He recommends using AI to help with prompting, such as ChatGPT, Anthropic's prompt generator, and Zapier Copilot.  

Using AI and automation to empower, not replace humans

Ever the adventurers, UltraCamp continues to explore new ways to use Zapier and AI, all with a single purpose in mind: supporting camps and the transformative power of their programs.