Today’s interview is with Katie Christian who is the Head of Customer Success at Calendly one of the fastest-growing product-led growth companies. Katie joins me today to talk about time, scheduling, how much time is wasted setting up meetings, why scheduling is an essential part of customer experience, how it can help create competitive advantage and a bunch of other things.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Five years on and real time guidance is now becoming a must have for a modern CX organization – Interview with Josh Feast of Cogito – and is number 448 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Calendly for sponsoring my podcast this month.

Calendly makes scheduling meetings easy and efficient, eliminating the hassle of back-and-forth emails so you can get back to work. 

Used by everyone from small businesses to Fortune 100 companies, over ten million people around the world rely on Calendly to close deals, build better relationships with their customers, drive customer success, and grow their businesses — faster.

Find out more about Calendly here.  

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Katie:

• Katie’s primary focus: Making sure that our customers are supported and their feedback is actioned.
• We are on a journey to increase connections on a virtual and physical scale. 
• Two key stats about meetings:
  • On average, it takes eight back and forth emails to get a meeting scheduled.
  • By scheduling a meeting with Calendly, on average, our users are saving about 15 minutes of their time. When you think about how many meetings are scheduled in a week for a given professional, that can be anywhere from 15 minutes up to hours saved.
• 90% of all problems that exist in the service domain tend to happen in the gaps between teams.
• When you think about the customer journey and the customer experience, you want a consistent elevated experience, right? Scheduling is an intrinsic part of that.
• There such a thing as scheduling etiquette and Calendly have created a whole blog series about it.
• Our number one focus is to how can we use our time wisely.
• There is sometimes fear involved in opening up your calendar to allow folks to book meetings but you can create multiple schedules for availability.
• I’ve seen some really fantastic customers insert Calendly at the top of their funnel so when a lead books a meeting then it takes them to a routing page that showcases all of the ROI specific case studies and other relevant materials for that particular prospect. 
• Similarly, when we have a customer schedule a meeting with one of our Customer Success Managers (CSM) it then routes them to our blog for what’s news on all the latest updates within the product.
• Utilize that attention, whether it’s for a minute or longer and redirect it somewhere and make the most out of that experience.
• Our best customers are using Calendly across their business (sales, customer experience, support, customer success, product teams etc) to improve both their internal and external service and experience.
• This has allowed them to engage at a higher frequency with their customer base right, to secure renewal calls faster than ever before and to achieve higher retention outcomes. However, it can be applied all the way across the customer journey, including in the areas of product feedback and capturing voice of customer insight.
• Scheduling is a bit like removing the friction of queuing.
• Check out the range of ways that Calendly’s customers are leveraging the product across their customer journeys.
• Time is the most precious commodity that we have.
• In 2023, we are we’re going to keep marching forward with scheduling at the heart of all that we do, but we’re gonna begin to focus on specific verticals and going deeper to make sure that we’re serving each of these teams exceptionally well.
• The two big things that we’ve learnt over the last couple of years:
  • 1. The importance of data insights and how that is helping to empower our health scores and to inform the business on where we’re going, and
  • 2. To be mindful of the challenges that people and their businesses are facing.
• Every impression matters.
• Katie’s Punk CX word(s): Don’t overthink
• Katie’s Punk XL brand: Salesforce, Zappos.

About Katie

Katie Christian is a customer-centric revenue leader who’s passionate about serving and scaling businesses and teams. Today, Katie leads as Head of Customer Success at Calendly one of the fastest-growing product-led growth companies. She’s been named a Top 40 Customer Success Influencer and a Top 50, Sales Women to Watch. 

Throughout her career, Katie has paired her enthusiasm and data-driven mindset to create meaningful customer journeys focused on high adoption and growth. Hired as the 7th employee at SalesLoft, one of the fastest-growing B2B SaaS startups, Katie was instrumental in scaling the business to $35M over four years in addition to successfully founding and scaling the Customer Success, Support, Onboarding, and Strategic Accounts functions. 

Over the past 10 years, she’s partnered with startup and B2B tech companies morphing their culture, revenue growth, and retention. Katie helps executive teams define culture, recruit top talent, and create strategies for their go-to-market teams.

Find out more about Calendly here, say Hi to Katie and Calendly on Twitter @KatieKortnie and @Calendly and feel free to connect with Katie on LinkedIn here.

Photo by Eric Rothermel on Unsplash