A customer strategy built on learning
As we expand Clara’s scheduling support repertoire and the types of teams we’re working with, I wanted to learn more about how Clara works with our most experienced customers. One of our operating principles is to accelerate learning, so I carved out a lot of time in January and February to talk to those for whom Clara has made scheduling workflows more efficient and reliable. These meetings gave me insights about how impactful Clara is, how creative our customers are, and what features we should better explain or build. All of this feedback is helping inform the strategy of our growing business.
The impact of Clara in this process
Using the new status labels in my meeting preferences dashboard, I can easily see I had 27 meetings with customers from 14 companies. I was shocked to realize it took Clara handling 18 reschedules to get it all booked! Imagine the time it takes your team to just nail down time to talk to their 20–50 customers each quarter.
Let’s say your customers are as busy as ours, and the 67% reschedule rate for a 30 minute QBR-style meeting is accurate. How much time is your customer success manager spending just scheduling those meetings? I saved 9 hours for this one batch:
27 meetings + 18 reschedules = 45 meetings needing attention
2 emails to suggest times + 1 invite per meeting = 3 messages/meeting * 45 meetings = 135 messages I didn’t have to write
135 messages * (1 min/email to read incoming replies + 2 min/email to write a reply + 1 min/email context switch tax) = 9 hours I got back to work on other things
I’ll be honest, these numbers underestimate how much back-and-forth the meetings actually took, and how much time each message would have stolen from my day; however, even with these crazy-low estimates, scheduling is something I’m more than happy to have Clara handle for me so I get a full day of work hours back to do things for our customers.
What did I do in this particular case with all that time? Working at a lean startup where I wear many hats, getting any amount of time back is incredible. This chunk of time meant I could craft a better message about the latest features we’ve launched, find better ways to showcase the full functionality of Clara (especially ways in which Clara can automate manual work), and dive deeper into people’s day-to-day scheduling needs so I could tailor the conversation. The meetings were incredible, and out of these conversations we were able to help our customers use Clara in even more ways (hence the 27 meetings with 14 companies). If meetings are at the center of any part of your business, then Clara can probably help — as of today we’ve plugged into recruiting, business development, sales, event organization, and leadership teams.
On top of this, Clara’s features deserve a little highlight
Codewords can eliminate manual work.
Many of the people I spoke with didn’t know how powerful codewords are. You can always give Clara explicit instructions in a message, and use codewords to convey complex instructions succinctly. Any time you use one of these pre-set words or phrases in the body of an email, you’ll be giving Clara detailed instructions to handle the request outside of your normal preferences. This lets you empower Clara to schedule quickly with elevated priority, avoid manual follow-ups by proposing broader time options for people in distant locations, and much more. Send Clara your codeword, and we’ll set it up for you. Then, you can always see your established codewords in the Advanced section of your meeting preferences dashboard.
People are curious to learn more about how Clara works.
A lot of our customers are impressively tech-savvy. It’s not surprising: AI is getting plenty of hype and sparking lots of curiosity. But even among the customers who knew we use a human-in-the-loop approach, many didn’t know how it works. After I explained Clara is powered by software and a team of scheduling experts, the common response was something like “Oh! That’s why Clara can handle my complex emails and crazy schedule so well.” We believe human-in-the-loop is the best approach for building a precise, reliable scheduling service, and love that we’re making progress in leaps and bounds.
In the future, we need to support more integrations.
In addition to Clara, our customers are using other software to manage their workflows — especially CRMs and conference call services. To get started, I’m working with our engineering team to see when we can build support for dynamic conference line details, so that each virtual meeting can have unique details.
Most importantly, having these conversations reminded me how helpful Clara is for people in all types of roles and industries, especially when integrated into the team’s workflows. The pain of managing scheduling details, missing out on opportunities to connect, and trying to keep track of meeting throughput is widely felt. We’re honored that you trust us with your relationships, and we strive to take great care of everyone you meet with.
