AirTable is not a lawn or bar game

As most SaaS founders know...getting customer support (fine...customer success...just stop...please...) right can seem like a full time job for anyone.

It's not enough to build a great product or even a killer MVP.  You have to have great support behind it as a backbone.  Sometimes (let's be honest) it's the only thing differentiating you from your competition.  

And guess what?  That's ok actually.

Game on mudder fudder!

And that's why I sit here in sunny Los Angeles today and write this piece.  We're not actually knocking it out of the park in CRM category but we're def hustling and taking every advantage we can and kindness hacking the shit out of what we can, when we can.

That brings me to AirTable.

If AirTable was a knife, it would be the Swiss Army of the lot.

No wonder they just raised $52M in vulture capital.  They are a beast of an application.

I'm going to go on the record and say they are/will be an Asana (or any other project management software) killer.

There a unicorn, so what...what's your point?

So there is literally a million applications for AirTable across all SMBs & Enterprise organizations that you would need a Wikipedia in order to describe all the use cases for them all.

Lucky for you, I'm just going to be covering customer support in this article.

We recently started leveraging AirTable for a booster in our customer support efforts and it's got me sooooo excited... I actually put down my vodka cranberry to tell you about it.  

That's a big deal dude.

So how have we been leveraging AirTable?

We using it as a customer intelligence dashboard.  As the first screenshot shows, we're logging all of our customer support tickets in a snazzy little database and then adding elements to it that helps us clear the fog.

Now to be fair, some CRM software provides some of this eye candy and efficiency already, but you can't pick up the phone and call any of them to get them to change certain things you don't like about their apps. 

They have their roadmap and we have to respect that.  As a SaaS founder myself, I get it.

And honestly, that's what scares me a little bit about AirTable.

Building solutions for your business on AirTable is akin to building block towers in Kindergarten.

I can see, literally, a hundred SaaS apps inside AirTable that will that can be done for free that could drive other applications out of business.

How can you compete with free?  Comment below your thoughts....

The details...

Let me get a little more granular now on how we're using AirTable.

First off all, we're planning on shipping two more products this year and we love how we can tag all of our support tickets from GrooveHQ in our spreadsheet for each application and color code them.

BTW - these tickets don't just magically appear in there.  We have to connect them via a Zap... but who cares, that's like common now.  Zapier is the glue of all things app based on the internet. #bravoZap

In addition to color coded candy proficiencies, we have the ability to add several relevant fields to the right of each ticket to add as much context as we want to each ticket.

Graphs, graphs and more graphs...

Next up is the handy little block feature they recently added.  It's a graphical overlay of data representing anything you want to really spice things up.

In our case, we wanted to know very simply, across all of our tickets how were the categories distributed?  If you know what part of your app is getting the most attention you have a better chance of squashing the small 🐜 before they turn into big 🔥s.

In addition to graphs, you can then build out even more options to really round out the solution for your business.  

You need an a feature added?  No problem...AirTable can do it.

Once the juices really got flowing and we got all butterflied in the chest, we really started adding options.

In particular, we started added tabs at the top to help our customer support virtual assistant capture important or crucial information to our business.

In this case, it was feature or application testimonials we could leverage later on on our homepage or in email campaigns.

Wrapping it up

I'm scared.  I'm glad I'm not in the CRM space for applications but I don't think it will stop there.  AirTable could eat all of our lunches one day, especially with a fresh round of funding.  But until now, join them if you can't beat them and make hay while the sun is shining.