Manual scheduling left Zillow's partner team stuck mapping calls by hand
Before Chili Piper, scheduling with partners was left almost entirely to individual reps' discretion.
There was no reliable way to connect a Gong call recording back to the partner meeting it belonged to. That meant the ops team had no clean way to pull insights across the partner network, just a pile of disconnected calls and meetings.
Reps also needed two things off the shelf that Chili Piper didn't support yet: the ability to book over an existing calendar event when a partner could only meet at that exact time, and the ability to schedule 50 to 100 recurring meetings per rep with no end date, the volume it takes to actually build a partner relationship over time.
Andreas built the missing pieces directly with the Chili Piper API
Andreas Mercado, Systems and Strategy Manager at Zillow, owns scheduling and reporting for the partner-facing sales team. She built a homegrown CRM and scheduling command center on Replit, combining the Chili Piper API with the Google Calendar API.
Inside it, reps pull up their partner roster, select a partner, and move through a scheduling wizard that sets meeting type, location, and duration. In practice, "they log in to this every single day."
There are 2 pieces doing most of the heavy lifting:
- Force booking: a custom, visually flagged feature that surfaces a calendar conflict, lets the rep preview it, and books over the existing event anyway.
- Recurring meetings: Andreas built logic that generates a batch of individual meetings on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly cadence, simulating a recurring series through Chili Piper and Google Calendar together.
She also pulled in the Google Calendar API so reps can see an internal teammate's live availability and force-book on their behalf, and rebuilt Chili Piper's "schedule from a reply" pattern inside Zillow's own communications hub, so reps never have to leave an email thread to get a meeting on the calendar.
"I use the API because of the customization that allows me."
— Andreas Mercado, Systems and Strategy Manager at Zillow
The scheduling pop-up and workflow Andreas built, step by step:
The Toolbox
- Chili Piper API: availability, booking, link management, routing, and lifecycle/sync endpoints
- Google Calendar API: live availability sync, including for internal teammates pulled in mid-flow
- Chili Piper's Gong integration: maps recorded calls back to the correct partner meeting automatically
- Replit: hosts the full command center, built on an underlying Claude-based coding model
- Claude Cowork: helps Andreas plan out how to prompt Replit, carrying context between sessions about the persona she wants the AI to act as
The pilot is already scaling toward the full floor
The build is currently being piloted with 15 reps, with a full rollout to 200 reps planned by September. Reps are already scheduling across 8+ Meeting Types, and Zillow finally has a working Gong-to-partner mapping strategy where before there was none.
The whole build took several months, but unlocked new workflows for the team: roughly a month to map Chili Piper to Zillow's specific use cases, two months building the command center in Replit, and a further month of tweaking.
What she'd tell the next builder
As the underlying models get sharper, Andreas has had to get more deliberate about how she prompts them, not less.
"The more intelligent it gets, the more that I really have to put guardrails around it."
— Andreas Mercado
She now explicitly tells the AI to ask her questions at every step, something she didn't used to need to spell out.
The Results
- 15-rep pilot, scaling to 200 reps by September
- 8+ custom meeting types live for reps scheduling on their own behalf
- Full Gong-to-partner call mapping where none existed before
- Custom force-booking and open-ended recurring scheduling, neither natively supported by Chili Piper
Want the full walkthrough of Andreas' build? Watch it below.
Have an idea? Start here
Andreas started with a scheduling problem and an API. See what you can build with the same one.
In the meantime, stay spicy! 🔥
