How Toast Provides Value at Every Step of the Customer Journey

Consistency is key.

You may have heard that saying before, but for Toast, it’s critical to their success. 

Consistency in how they’re scheduling meetings.

Consistency in their branding. 

Without it, meetings start getting canceled… no-shows become a frequent occurrence… and onboarding momentum rapidly declines.

We chatted about this with Kolben Preble, Senior Marketing Manager at Toast — a restaurant technology platform. 

Specifically, Kolben is tasked with ensuring the activation and adoption of new customers. 

“I’m focused on customer product activation,” Kolben said. “And within that, the onboarding journey.”

What did that look like before Chili Piper?

When a new customer signs on with Toast, there's generally a number of onboarding appointments the customer needs to book to get started.

“Prior to Chili Piper, we didn’t have a consistent tool that we were using to book meetings,” Kolben said. 

They had onboarding consultants who would reach out to the customer via email to schedule a meeting… often using a Calendly booking link. 

One of their biggest challenges with that process was they didn’t have a way to automate the meeting types. 

“We couldn’t use automation — or nurtures, from a marketing perspective — to assist the customer in booking those meeting types,” Kolben said.

How Chili Piper changed the game

“Chili Piper gave us the functionality to create org-wide meeting types that we could distribute to all of our onboarding consultants,” Kolben said. “And ensured that they were using consistent meeting types.” 

They were also able to use Chili Piper’s meeting status to automate some of the fields within those projects. 

This solved two main pain points:. 

1. Speed to lead

The first was the speed to lead of booking their onboarding meetings. 

“We want to maintain momentum from the sale, all the way through their onboarding process,” Kolben said. “One thing we’ve been able to do with Chili Piper is use a round-robin queue to aggregate availability across all our onboarding consultants and route our customer to the first available consultant.”

Previously, they didn’t know the onboarding consultant’s availability before assigning them to the account. If they happened to be sick, or on vacation, the customer wouldn’t get an email from them until they were back — leaving them in the dark.

Immediately after implementing Chili Piper, there were tangible results.

“We’ve seen a 10% increase in the speed to completing that kickoff call as well as a 25% increase in the speed to scheduling that kickoff call.” 

2. Automated reminders

“The other area where Chili Piper has really helped us out is automated reminders via email and text message,” Kolben said. 

Being able to send out automated reminders has resulted in a 19% reduction in cancellation rates and no-shows. 

For Toast, this is huge in terms of:

• Time-savings for their teams

• Money savings for the company

• Increases in their capacity 

Meeting the customer where they’re at

Toast is using Chili Piper Handoff to increase availability and get meetings booked quickly.

“Handoff allows us to aggregate availability across our entire pool of users within our team,” Kolben said. “Rather than just looking at the specific user and seeing their availability.” 

“It allows us to meet the customer where they’re at and provide a lot more availability for the customer.”

Unlocking additional value

A lot of businesses use Chili Piper for the lead-to-book portion of the customer lifecycle. But Toast went a step further, extending it into the activation portion of the lifecycle.

“We can track cancellation rates, no show rates, and SMS responses,” Kolben said. “And then using the integration with Salesforce, we can pretty easily create Salesforce reporting that ties it to our contact/account objects. That really unlocks a lot of reporting for the managers.” 

This also benefits the business as a whole — enabling consistent scheduling of all customer appointments across the entire customer lifecycle. 

“That’s something that is a huge value add from Chili Piper,” Kolben said. “Everyone within the business is using the same tools to schedule meetings with customers, and the customers have a really consistent and branded scheduling experience across their entire lifecycle with Toast.” 

Want to see what value Chili Piper can add to your business? Let’s chat.