Turbulent economic headwinds and unpredictable customer behavior have put immense pressure on customer experience teams. Many are asked to do more with less at a time when customers expect the absolute most from their vendors.
As a result, many organizations are looking to adapt or expand the tools that support the teams looking after their most important assets. To help with this, scheduling platform company Calendly on March 29 announced a new product to alleviate much of the mundane, manual work for CX teams.
Calendly Routing is a new solution built to enable CX teams to instantly qualify, route, and schedule meetings with high-value leads and customers from their company’s website. The cloud-based platform offers a new layer of the modern digital technology stack.
Routing integrates directly with Marketo, HubSpot, and Salesforce to help sales, marketing, and customer success teams close deals faster using the industry tools already backed into their existing tech stacks.
“Calendly Routing is a remarkable product for go-to-market teams,” said Scott Brinker, vice president of platform ecosystem at HubSpot. “It turns buyer interactions into meaningful, instantaneous opportunities, all within an intuitive scheduling platform.”
More Efficient Lead Processing
Customers hold more power and expect real-time responses as companies risk losing business. According to Salesforce’s State of Sales Report, 82% of sales professionals say they have had to adapt quickly to new ways of selling.
Revenue teams across sales, marketing, and customer experience face increased demands to deliver more leads faster — and, in turn, more revenue with fewer resources. With unpredictable business outcomes, outstanding customer care is a renewed focus for revenue teams.
“The most effective, well-oiled revenue machine teams know that if you are not engaging with a lead at their moment of interest, you are creating a poor customer experience and opening the door to competitors reaching them first,” Jessica Gilmartin, CMO at Calendly, told CRM Buyer.
Calendly Routing will help drive even more value by assisting users to achieve a more efficient and straightforward sales process, she offered. Leads and customers can increase website and email conversion by qualifying leads in real time. They can book a meeting after completing a HubSpot, Marketo, or Calendly Routing Form that is either embedded or shared as a link on the desired company’s website.
Expanding Infrastructure
Users can automatically route leads and customers by Salesforce ownership. Calendly Routing automatically matches existing customers and leads to their account owner from Salesforce before prompting them to schedule a meeting.
Routing scales business performance with one centralized scheduling platform. According to Calendly, it is the only centralized automation platform built for scaling scheduling across the entire organization.
The current integration works with a few major CRM platforms. But that is not a limiting factor for using it, noted Gilmartin.
“We wanted to create a really great experience. We needed to ensure that it was bespoke and worked well with the existing tools. So it currently integrates with Marketo, HubSpot, and Salesforce because they are the most popular tools in the market, and that is what our customers were asking us for,” she said.
Calendly is already working on new integrations for other CRMs. But currently, the company is focused on these platforms from a marketing perspective.
How Calendly Routing Works
Calendly Routing automatically looks up and matches existing customers and leads to their account owner from Salesforce before prompting them to schedule a meeting. This functionality makes it easy for buyers to connect with the right salesperson at the right time without time-consuming, manual reassignments.
“As a marketer, the thing that I care most about is getting leads to opportunities, which is really hard. It’s a very leaky bucket,” Gilmartin quipped.
When customers come to a website, they fill out a form that goes into a very complex routing system, either manual or automated. That lead gets routed to a salesperson hours or days later. Then the salesperson then has to reach out to schedule a meeting with a qualified prospect.
“There are leakages everywhere in that process. The Calendly Routing removes all of that leakage. So, customers come to the website and get qualified automatically, said Bryce Kropf, senior sales manager at Smith.ai. We match them to the right salesperson instantly, and they can schedule a time with that salesperson at that moment on the website,” he explained.
The new integration scales business performance with one centralized scheduling platform. It helps organizations increase business performance as workers navigate distributed work, an influx of communication and collaboration tools, and greater competition.
Better Connections
That complex scheduling and routing are challenging to do, according to Gilmartin. Calendly makes the process simple for businesses to set up and easy for customers to use.
Calendly has integrations, deep analytics, and enterprise-grade security, including SCIM provisioning. With it, teams can focus on closing more deals, retaining more customers, hiring more top talent, and maximizing productivity.
“This is a unique routing system that nobody else has created, especially given that we enable a marketer to use their existing forms,” she observed.
Gilmartin added that the system does not remove any of the existing qualifications rules a company already has in place, and it does not interfere with any of the existing enrichment platforms that a marketer already uses to ensure that the right leads are getting to the right salesperson.
Case in Point
Kropf noted that the Calendly Routing integration positively impacted his company’s business operations. He praised the product’s potential to convert inbound leads into qualified demos with the correct account executive. For him, that was the intriguing factor that cinched the deal.
“We are seeing an incredible 70% conversion rate of meetings booked through the form. The experience is clearly resonating with customers, and it is driving better results for our sales and marketing teams,” he told CRM Buyer.
Calendly Routing eliminates dispute issues among leads, he noted. It makes sure customers only see the calendar of the right salesperson — avoiding confusion on their end — while helping teams buy back 10 to 12 hours each month that historically had been spent managing that process manually.
“We have also seen a 5% rise in show rates of initial consults. We attribute this to the power of Calendly Routing since it eliminates the confusion and messiness involved in shifting reps, calendars, and booking times,” he observed.
The scheduling integration also impacted his company’s team morale and focus. Before using Routing, his staff was taken away from work they were passionate about.
“They were left having to deal with unnecessary lead flow logistics. Repeating this process over and over is tiring, unproductive, and wastes time and dollars. Calendly helps patch those holes to keep both customers and team members happy,” he said.
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