The challenge

Scheduling tech frustrated customers and employees 

In the recruiting industry, there’s not a moment to lose. Criteria is a talent success company that uses pre-employment assessments and other tools to help organizations identify and retain the best possible candidates. To meet the demands of a challenging recruiting market, the customer success team needed a way to onboard and serve customers as quickly as possible. 

Before adopting Calendly, Criteria used a different scheduling automation solution that was cumbersome to manage and not intuitive. Customers often had challenges reaching the CS team when they needed to most, leaving voicemails and waiting until a team member was available for a response.

“With the previous scheduling solution, our CS team spent too much time troubleshooting problems with calendar invitations, such as missing information needed to connect with customers,” says Cody Cooley, Criteria’s CS manager. “Resolving these issues took time away from both the customer success manager and our customers.” 

Criteria’s CS team needed a way to simplify these interactions, speed up customer onboarding, and create milestones to deepen the customer relationship.

Criteria Corp ramped CSMs 75% faster with Calendly

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The solution

Getting employees onboarded quickly with Calendly

Criteria’s CS team adopted Calendly to put customers in the driver’s seat, scheduling support sessions on their terms. For CSMs, getting started with Calendly was easy, even if they weren’t technically savvy.  

“Compared to our previous scheduling automation solution, Calendly’s user interface was a breath of fresh air. Calendly made it possible for us to shorten onboarding time for new team members to 30 minutes or less. It helps a new team member feel as if onboarding is not a burden.”

Cody Cooley

Manager, Customer Success at Criteria Corp

Making high-priority customer meetings a breeze

From there, it was simple for CSMs to set their own availability. The CS team leveraged Calendly’s team scheduling features to book meetings with multiple team members at once, for important milestones like onboarding calls or large renewals. Features like Round Robin are useful for cycling meetings between multiple team members, while Collective Events help schedule meetings when all selected team members are available. 

“It takes a village to create a successful customer,” Cooley says. “With Collective Events, we serve our customers with availability that works for everyone who needs to be a part of the call. Overall, Calendly reduces the customer’s frustration, allowing us to kick off the relationship on a positive note.”

Reaching the customer through multiple touchpoints

To make it easier for customers to reach CSMs, Criteria embedded Calendly links into every form of customer communication, including a “Contact Us” module within its own product. The team often adds custom questions to its Calendly meeting invites, to save time by addressing customer questions as quickly as possible.

“Calendly makes every one of our customers feel special: They’re only a click away from scheduling onboarding, user training, or just grabbing general time to connect with us.”

Cody Cooley

Manager, Customer Success at Criteria Corp

“We’re not shy about embedding Calendly links wherever we can,” Cooley says. “Rather than playing phone tag, we can focus on the solutions we want to provide to support their business, ensuring that our relationship is as positive and as beneficial as it can be.”

Criteria also encourages its customers to use Calendly in their own recruiting processes with candidates. The goal is to create an ecosystem of solutions that makes recruiting more efficient and effective. 

“Many customers have expressed that Calendly has helped with their hiring process. Ultimately, that's our goal: To make their recruiting easier,” says Cooley.

Templates and integrations make scheduling easy

Calendly has removed the frustrations of the previous scheduling automation solution. CSMs have more control over their calendars, with templates they can tailor and customize to save time. Integrations with Zoom, Outlook, and Okta single sign-on (SSO) make Calendly a natural part of employees’ existing workflows. 

“I want my CSMs to be themselves, because the best way to engage with a customer is to be a person,” Cooley says. “Our customer success team members don't think we're trying to control the way that they organize their calendar or engage with their customers. People appreciate that Calendly saves them extra work.”

The results

After just one year of using Calendly, Criteria’s CS team has already seen a 579% ROI. Even though Criteria was accustomed to automated scheduling in the past, Calendly made onboarding much simpler for employees and customers alike. CS team members saved 1,440 hours, or 180 business days, during the past year. In annual labor cost savings, that time adds up to more than $95,000.

Their biggest achievement? CSMs were onboarded 75% faster than before Calendly — from two hours to just 30 minutes! More than 5,760 meetings were scheduled in the last 12 months alone, and customers encountered 94% fewer scheduling problems. 

“With Calendly, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in our onboarding satisfaction for our CSMs. Our customer experience is more efficient and satisfying as well, because they get access to their CSMs quickly. It’s a win-win,” Cooley says.

Ready to explore what Calendly can do for your bottom line? Sign up for a free, 14-day trial today.

To learn more about the features Criteria Corp uses – such as Round Robin, Workflows, and more – contact our Sales team.