READ TIME: 7 MINUTES
After reviewing their tech stack for security certifications, HackerOne needed a better scheduling solution that supports SSO and SCIM. Enter Calendly.
Challenges
Immaculate care for customers and their data
As a global provider of cybersecurity testing and consultation, HackerOne is dedicated to delivering the highest level of service while increasing their customers’ resistance to attack.
For their Customer Success team, seamless scheduling is a top priority. The team relies on smooth digital meetings to drive HackerOne’s growth, says Alek Relyea, Manager, Customer Success.
“To maintain our revenue and secure renewals, we’ve got to make sure our clients aren’t just happy, they’re successful. So, we live and breathe in Zoom,” Alek says. “Being able to quickly and easily schedule these meetings is absolutely crucial to our organization.”
Various employees at HackerOne started using Calendly individually to set boundaries around their calendars and schedule meetings in just a few clicks.
One of those employees using Calendly was Zander, Head of IT and Workplaces. When he and his colleagues started developing compliance policies for HackerOne, they realized they’d need to re-evaluate a large swath of the company’s tech stack.
Zander says, “We were quick to get HackerOne authorized for ISO 27000, FedRAMP, and SOC 2. As a small company, that made us very proud. But it meant that we had to move and cut off certain applications.”
Zander and his team had to investigate every app that the organization considered to make sure it was DPA and GDPR compliant, and CTPA certified. Even integrations within each tool had to be searched for potential gateways they might offer to malicious actors.
During that vetting period, Calendly usage was put on hiatus while it went under the microscope. That left Alek and his team struggling to use other scheduling solutions.
“We tried using the scheduling automations attached to our sales email platform, but it was very clunky,” Alek says.
HackerOne soon swapped email tools: Unfortunately, the new email platform didn’t have a scheduling tool at all.
“So we were stuck looking at our Google Calendar, seeing what was available, and manually typing emails to offer clients options,” Alek says. “It could take days or weeks to get a meeting scheduled. We were wasting an incredible amount of time going back and forth.”
That lag time was impacting the critical meetings that HackerOne’s experts relied on to advise their clients and keep up to date with their evolving needs.
Zander and his team worked diligently to weigh each app’s business value against its security features.
When it came to scheduling platforms, nothing compared to Calendly.
“We presented a couple of different options, but Calendly was the friendliest to our business. It had the best UX. It just really resonated with people,” Zander says.
HackerOne implemented Calendly for Enterprise within the Customer Success team and it quickly spread through the product and management teams, as well.
“With nothing but Google Calendar and emails, it could take days or weeks to get a meeting scheduled,” Alek says. “We were wasting an incredible amount of time going back and forth.”
Solution
A flexible scheduling platform built for business
Alek was thrilled with Calendly right out of the gate. “When we had our first enablement session with Calendly, I immediately thought, ‘This is going to save us countless hours each week.’”
He appreciated that Calendly was easy to learn. It let his team share their availability in just a few clicks, and book meetings in minutes.
It impressed him further that the people behind the solution seemed genuinely devoted to HackerOne’s success.
“We had some feedback early on around the UI and we made some feature requests,” Alek says. “Those ideas were listened to, and many of them were implemented pretty quickly. To me, that proved it was a true partnership. As CSMs ourselves, we have pretty high standards for support.”
Any type of meeting booked effortlessly
Alek loves how well Calendly flexes to serve the needs of HackerOne’s CSMs, product security experts, and managers.
For individual contributors, Calendly’s Event Types allowed the company to create meeting links that could be standardized and shared across the organization.
“Whether it’s a CSM sitting in London, Singapore, or San Francisco, they’re all having success meetings, quarterly executive business reviews, and program syncs. Having a template for each that we can share with the press of a button is really powerful,” Alek says.
As a manager, he relies on single-use links to maximize his availability for his team while maintaining control of his schedule.
Alek says, “My calendar is unbelievably full. So, I love to manually select which times I want to offer. It lets me spend more time enabling my team without getting slammed with ten meetings in one day.”
Highly efficient processes
Calendly’s integrations add extra speed to the scheduling process.
“We have a Calendly tile in our SSO homepage, an icon in our Chrome bar, and an integration directly in our Gmail. So no matter where we are, we can get that meeting booked with just a few clicks,” Alek says.
These efficiencies have freed up time for HackerOne to implement other important projects, like setting up their new customer success software, Gainsight.
“Calendly enabled us to implement Gainsight, and now we can automate touchpoints and gain data insights on our customer journey,” Alek says. “It’s helping us make more informed decisions.”
Safeguarding data with SSO and SCIM
For HackerOne, security features are essential.
Zander and his team trust Calendly’s Okta SSO compatibility to reduce the vulnerability of having multiple login authentications.
“The number one threat against a company’s data is people trying to log in as an employee into their applications and services,” Zander says. “Single sign-on (SSO) removes that risk.”
Connecting all of HackerOne’s applications through a single, secure funnel minimizes password management work by consolidating everything under one, strong credential.
Calendly’s SCIM provisioning also lightens the load for IT. Calendly lets admins categorize users by department or function, and automate processes for creating and managing accounts.
Easy proof for compliance
Calendly’s excellent documentation makes it easy for HackerOne to demonstrate compliance.
“Calendly goes above and beyond to publish their compliance information,” Zander says. “That’s important to us, because having an official document from a vendor is considered a more accurate source of truth by our auditors than just an email from their CSM.”
With compliance-friendly security features and lightning-fast scheduling, Calendly is a perfect fit for HackerOne.
Results
169% ROI and organizational growth
With Calendly’s easy-to-use, blazing-fast scheduling process, HackerOne’s Customer Success team has realized an outstanding 169% ROI in a 12-month period.
“We’ve saved 588 hours on scheduling meetings since implementing Calendly. That’s 73 business days,” Alek says. “When you consider that time savings against the average salary of a CSM, Calendly pays for itself, and then some.”
In addition, the company as a whole is booking 114% more meetings YOY and reaching 88% more customers YOY.
“That increase in meetings gives us more connection with our customers,” Alek says. “We stay aligned with their goals and objectives, which leads to renewals and expansion, and that golden egg of net retention.”
With the time they’re reclaiming, the CS team is delivering more enablement training and collaborating better with cross-functional teams.
“That’s 73 additional days that we’ve been out of the weeds and thinking strategically. It’s making us more mature as a CS organization,” Alek says.
Remembering life before Calendly, Alek hates to think about ever going without it again.
“There would be an uproar if we tried to take Calendly away,” he says. “For an organization like ours that relies on Zoom meetings for client communication, we have to have a tool like this. There’s no way around it.”
To other customer success teams looking for a better way to schedule, Alek says: “Calendly works. It’s got a great UI, great support, and no complaints from our compliance team. If your organization is spending a lot of time going back and forth just to get on a call, it’s a no-brainer.”
