How Rally Helped Calendly Operationalize Their 'Wild, Wild West' Customer Outreach

The challenge: An uncoordinated research practice risking respondent burnout

Ray Mason-Murillo was hired by Calendly not because the company wasn't doing user research. He was hired because everyone at Calendly was doing user research, all the time, with whatever tools they had lying around -- and no one was keeping an eye on the big picture or best practices.

"We had spreadsheets across all different teams. People we wanted to talk to, but we didn't know when the last time we had talked to them was," Ray said. "It was a bit of the wild, wild West." 

Alise Crain notes this chaos came from good intentions. "The research culture is really strong on Calendly's design team, so customers and user feedback is at the foundation of everything we do." That desire to talk to customers quickly and consistently led to some less-than-optimal research habits. "What we would do was actually send direct emails to customers from our personal Calendly emails," whenever they stood up a study, with no idea how recently or how often that customer had already been contacted.

The solution: Deploy a 'research CRM' to manage customer participation

Calendly needed a CRM just for the research operations that measured and managed research participation, not sales touches or billing status. They had to move beyond scattered spreadsheets to a centralized system that made finding and reaching respondents easy, but customer burnout hard.

Calendly's choice was Rally. As Ray put it, "what made me decide that Rally was the tool for Calendly is that it housed all of the things that we needed in one place." That included:

• Vetted and segmented customer rosters
• Participation history
• Outreach email templates
• Study model templates
• Archive of study results

Ray summed it in terms that every ReOps leader hopes for. "[With Rally], we've really created an elegant self-service practice with guardrails."

The outcome: 50,000 potential respondents managed, and research has never been faster

Rally now provides Calendly with a single source of truth for research participant recruitment and activity. "We have about 50,000 of our customers in the system right now. About 10,000 of those are currently in cool-down," Ray said. "To me, that's really strong evidence that the system is working." No more worrying they've contacted a respondent too often just because they're already in a personal email contact list.

This control hasn't slowed UX research down at all. "[The Calendly team can] go into Rally, they're able to get sessions on their calendar in a number of days, same week, and they know that the participants are going to be high quality, that they're vetted in the right way, and they're exactly who they want to be talking to."

Alise agreed. "Now I see designers again really quickly jumping to say, 'Let me just spin this up really quickly,' now that they have access to Rally."

How Rally shines: Even better studies at even faster speeds

Here's how Ray summed up Rally's impact at Calendly: "The quality of [Calendly's UX] studies themself have gone up because researchers are able to focus more on the research practice instead of the operational headache."

Alise underlined why tools like Rally matter to Calendly and to UX practitioners everywhere: "AI prototyping helps us get from that idea to something tangible a lot more quickly. But if we're not really grounding that in real user problems, in talking to our customers, it's not really a viable solution."

"[Rally] has created a really, really smart ecosystem," Ray said. "It makes my life easier, it makes the participant's life easier, and it helps us enable teams to get insights from our customers more quickly."

"[Rally] has been a pleasure to work with and makes me look like a rock star at my job."

If you want to look like a ReOps rock star, Rally is the platform teams like Calendly trust to get you there. Explore Rally now by scheduling your personalized demo today.

‍