Editor’s note: This story was contributed by Leila Cruz, Content Partnerships Specialist at ClickUp.

As one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies worldwide, ClickUp has expanded its customer base to 800,000 teams in just over five years.

To help celebrate those customers, ClickUp rolled out the Customer Advocacy Program. The program’s mission is to connect with customers from all types of business segments to learn about their unique ClickUp adoption stories and use cases.

As ClickUp's customer base has grown worldwide, however, it’s become increasingly difficult to coordinate meetings and follow-up requests with every customer advocate, conduct persona research quickly, and scale the Customer Advocacy Program without the proper scheduling platform.

The challenge

Inefficient client communication processes

Without a proper tool in place to help support client communications, coordinating calls with clients took several days.

The Customer Advocacy team manually kept track of follow-up calls and waited patiently for customer replies over email to lock in a meeting date that worked for both parties. This led to the endless cycle of back-and-forth emailing, trying to find a suitable time. 

"In my world, the longer it takes to have an initial advocacy call with a customer, the longer it takes to drive toward my key high-touch advocacy outputs, such as case studies and video testimonials," said Tiffany Keel, ClickUp’s Head of Customer Advocacy, Product Marketing.

On a more strategic level, the goal was to build a pipeline of key advocacy initiatives that support the go-to-market strategy. To do this time-sensitive persona research, ClickUp needed 50-plus customer interviews. 

The challenge was to figure out how to schedule these calls more efficiently, and find the right tools to optimize the time and effort for scaling the Customer Advocacy Program.

The solution

"We've been using Calendly as our go-to meeting scheduler,” said Tiffany. “It's simplified the client communication process, and because it integrates with ClickUp and Zoom, we've created streamlined and automated workflows, too!”

Simplified booking process for meetings

What was a multi-step process is now simplified.

Sharing one link where customers can book a meeting time without needing to ask for availability has made communicating and scheduling initial and follow-up calls with its customers much more manageable.

And if customers need to reschedule, they can simply book a new meeting on Tiffany's meeting calendar via the Calendly link in her email signature or they can reschedule using the link automatically provided in the event description. Not only does this reduce the inefficiency of manual booking, but it has helped ClickUp become more approachable to their customers.

“After using it for just a couple of weeks, I definitely experienced fewer headaches when it came to coordinating calls. When I realized I could easily share one link and empower my customers to schedule and reschedule calls, I was sold!”

Tiffany Keel

Head of Customer Advocacy, Product Marketing at ClickUp

Instant access to meeting details with the Calendly + Zoom integration

Because ClickUp is all about creating efficient systems, they took advantage of Calendly's integration capabilities and connected it to Zoom to eliminate the admin work involved in scheduling video conference calls.

The Calendly + Zoom integration eliminates the manual task of adding Zoom meeting links and dial-in details to the email. This empowered their advocates to initiate connecting with the ClickUp team — they can choose from an accurate list of available meeting times that match both theirs and the ClickUp team’s  availability, without the extra back-and-forth emails.

"Calendly's integration capabilities have automated so many of our processes, created seamless workflows, and allowed our team to keep track of our client-facing projects," Tiffany said.

Streamlined workflow with the Calendly-ClickUp integration

ClickUp's integration with Calendly has been instrumental for the Customer Advocacy team. Syncing Calendly to ClickUp helped bring meetings, events, work schedules, and other work together in one centralized place.

The integration works by automatically importing event information from Calendly into the ClickUp platform, where the ClickUp team can track meetings alongside their tasks and projects. No more duplicate work and wasting time searching for information.

“There is so much to love! The ease of use for you and your customers, the integrations …  these tools will absolutely save you time and help you become more efficient in how you operationalize your calls and meetings across the board.”

Tiffany Keel

Head of Customer Advocacy, Product Marketing at ClickUp

The results

50% faster strategic customer persona projects

"The biggest benefit would be efficiency around customer engagement. I definitely save days in back-and-forth communications with clients,” Tiffany said. “Each client call helps drive my key advocacy deliverables forward, whether it’s an intro call or a more formal interview."

By using Calendly, its Zoom integration, and Clickup’s integration with Calendly, ClickUp was able to fast-track their persona development initiatives to support their GTM strategy.

Because scheduling calls have been simplified and streamlined, now ClickUp takes a one-to-many approach that lets their team communicate and move projects forward with multiple customers simultaneously, instead of manually engaging with one customer at a time. 

2x increase in customer engagement 

ClickUp and its customers have reduced communication barriers, such as the time-wasting back-and-forth emails that would have discouraged them from participating. The team can now connect with customers in a much more efficient way, which in turn has built stronger rapport and led to higher participation rates.

"Now, the process is automated, helping me focus on fostering the customer relationship,” Tiffany said. “This level of rapport has helped us increase customer engagement and build our Reference Program, where customers can opt-in to participate in future customer marketing initiatives." 

3x more sales enablement collateral created

“Calendly is a key tool in building my advocacy engine. By keeping the engine efficient, I can focus on actually deepening relationships with clients and driving key customer stories for our sales and marketing teams.”

Tiffany Keel

Head of Customer Advocacy, Product Marketing at ClickUp

Streamlined client communications enabled the ClickUp team to complete more than 50 persona interviews in two weeks!

And because they could connect with customers to hear their ClickUp adoption stories and use cases, ClickUp was able to ramp up their sales enablement collateral which consists of customer story blog posts, case studies, testimonial videos, community-built templates, and more. 

"It's been such an amazing experience to hear our customers' stories,” Tiffany said. “It makes me so happy to hear how ClickUp has helped them, and I'm thankful Calendly exists to help my team and I connect with as many customers and as easily as possible!"

How Calendly Helps Other ClickUp Teams

Designed to work across teams, Calendly’s scheduling automation is also helping other ClickUp departments hit their goals.

Enterprise Customer Support: 57% faster ticket resolution time 

 At ClickUp, customer service is at the core of their business, and delivering the best customer experience remains a top core value.

Their biggest obstacle to resolving ClickUp-related issues quickly had been the back-and-forth emails between their Enterprise Support team and customers to gather all the necessary information to assist in troubleshooting. This resulted in longer ticket times for support reps and slower resolutions for customers.

Calendly provides the support team with a direct connection to their customers in moments of need. With this new direct line of live communication with customers in place, ClickUp can more quickly collect accurate information and understand the complexity and nature of an issue. It’s shortened the resolution time by more than half, from an average of 3.5 days down to 1.5 days!

Using Calendly gives the team the extra time to open up more important conversations to help customers maximize the ClickUp platform for their businesses.

Talent Acquisition: Eliminated time zone confusion and optimized the recruitment process

As a hyper-growth SaaS company, ClickUp has been actively recruiting talented individuals from all over the globe, but with that came a few challenges. Coordinating schedules and aligning time zones required a lot of manual work and calculation conversions by their Talent Acquisition team. 

"It was difficult for us to record scheduling data or easily access the kind of candidate information that we needed to go into calls or interviews with the clarity that we wanted,” said Cheyene Gorman, Recruiter.

Calendly solves this issue by automatically detecting the time zones of their prospective candidates and adjusting availability accordingly — eliminating room for hiccups or confusion. 

"Best of all, with the Calendly-ClickUp integration, I can now track meetings alongside the ClickUp tasks that are associated with the candidate,” Cheyene said.

As one of the biggest advocates of productivity and creating efficient workflows, ClickUp’s integration with Calendly makes the two a power duo, helping teams streamline their scheduling processes and scale their efforts effectively.

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 ClickUp uses – such as Workflows, integrations, and more – contact our Sales team.