Author: Mollie bodensteiner

Introduction to Chili Piper

Founded in 2016, Chili Piper helped cement the common philosophy that speed-to-lead is crucial for converting prospects into customers. They’ve been positioned as a leader in the scheduling and meeting management space by enabling businesses to capture bookings at the point of request, minimizing the chances of missed opportunities.

Chili Piper is a very popular solution for meeting automation, lead routing, and scheduling capabilities. The platform’s over 50 app integrations allow for seamless connectivity across your tech stack, making it a versatile tool for teams of all sizes.

Users Love Chili Piper

Chili Piper offers an intuitive, user-friendly interface that both users and administrators find clean and easy to navigate. The platform’s implementation process is highly praised for its simplicity, supported by clear documentation and responsive customer support. Reviewers noted that basic integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Calendar, and other tools are straightforward, and don't require deep technical expertise to set up.

Reviewers highlighted that Chili Piper effectively enhances the customer experience by improving conversion rates from demo request, to booking, to meeting. It also facilitates smoother internal hand-offs between departments, especially when managing multiple-calendar scheduling. The platform’s ability to route leads quickly and efficiently has had a noticeable impact on meeting conversion rates and overall customer satisfaction.

Chili Piper recently introduced new branding of its “Demand Conversion Platform” and a free version of its calendar feature, ChiliCal. But, reviewers found quickly that they would need the paid version, which is potentially expensive for organizations with a larger number of users. With that said, their new pricing for Demand Conversion Platform allows for more bundling options and a single platform fee. Chili Piper’s transparent - no negotiation - pricing approach was favored by reviewers looking to understand upfront what costs would be, as well as an un-gated pricing calculator for bundling and term discounts. 

Areas for Improvement

Despite its strengths, Chili Piper faces challenges in supporting more complex use cases and customization needs. Reviewers pointed out some of the following:

• Troubleshooting and Debugging: Users found it difficult to troubleshoot issues due to the lack of a simple error log or centralized alerting system. While this is offset with a responsive Customer Support team, having more ability to self-troubleshoot is an opportunity. 
• Scalability: The platform struggles to scale effectively in larger, enterprise environments that require more granular user management and customized permissions. 
  • The single "super admin" role limits flexibility, forcing organizations to choose between broad access or restrictive controls. Additionally as they look to allow for more advanced routing, expanded user assignment to custom CRM user fields (in addition to default owner fields) will be necessary. 
• Reporting and Insights: The reporting and dashboard features have not seen significant updates this year. Reviewers described these tools as lacking value for generating actionable insights, with the saving grace being the ability to export data for external analysis.
• Platform Stability: Intermittent outages and bugs were a common concern among reviewers, raising questions about the platform’s reliability. We researched the incident history that Chili Piper offers on their website and noticed far fewer incidents in 2024 than were in 2023.
• Queue Management: For organizations with multiple queue configurations (e.g., across several regions or segments), the lack of functionality to validate and troubleshoot overlapping or conflicting queue criteria was a significant pain point. 
  • A reviewer indicated that they had to manage all of their queue assignments and tracking within a spreadsheet because Chili Piper does not provide a way for queues to be assigned to users at the user level. This makes it hard to keep track of who belongs where in a big changing team. 
• Standardization Across Users: While Chili Piper provides extensive control at the end-user level (e.g. for reminders and meeting types), creating standardization across users can be challenging without a robust onboarding and enablement process.

Looking Ahead:

Despite these challenges, the overall sentiment towards Chili Piper remains positive. Reviewers praised the company for its transparent sales process, clear pricing, and straightforward onboarding. The customer support team received high marks for their responsiveness and commitment to resolving critical technical issues.

At this time, we have not received any updates from Chili Piper representatives regarding their future roadmap. We will definitely come update the review if we get further input from their team. 

It’s important to note that any forward-looking statements or roadmap previews are not guarantees of future features or delivery. Decisions should be based on the current capabilities of the platform.

Disclosures: 

• Mollie has been a Chili Piper customer, and consulted their customers at 4 companies.
• There has been no compensation associated with this independent review, but we hope it's helpful to Chili Piper and their buyers.