Welcome to Change Makers, our series highlighting customer stories and builders making an incredible impact with Airtable. Today's Change Maker is one of our Airtable MVPs who built a comprehensive ticketing system to replace fragmented messaging and bring structure to internal operations across multiple campuses.
About the Builder
Charlotte Pichereau (
What's a fun fact most people (or your coworkers) don't know about you?
I'm pretty good at organizing challenge games and fun competitions.
What's your superpower at work?
Being fast and organized — I can juggle multiple complex topics simultaneously without losing track of any of them.
What's the most surprising use case you've seen (or built) in Airtable?
The most impressive thing I've built is probably our end-to-end document automation pipeline. Student contracts are generated automatically from Airtable data, sent for e-signature via eSignatures, orchestrated through Zapier, and stored back in the student record — all without any manual step. The same logic applies to invoicing: Airtable prepares the data, Zapier connects to Stripe for billing, and Gmail handles delivery and archiving. When you first see it run end-to-end, it feels like magic.
What's a small change that's had a big impact on your workflow?
I added a simple 'Send to student' button in each student file. When a document is added, one click sends it directly by email — no more downloading, opening Gmail, attaching the file, finding the student's email address. It sounds small but it saves the whole team several minutes per student, every single day.
What advice would you give to someone just getting started with Airtable?
Just start — even if it's messy and imperfect. Build something ugly, use it, break it, and improve it. The real learning happens in the doing. One word of caution though: be intentional about your data structure from the beginning. It's easy to get lost in a maze of fields and tables if you don't think about what you actually need to track.
The Challenge & Airtable Solution
Charlotte's role is highly cross-functional: she oversees quality compliance, student lifecycle management, billing, tools, and internal operations across multiple campuses. Airtable has been at the heart of operations for three years, from student tracking and contract generation to billing automation and quality monitoring.
"We are one of the first schools in our parent group to have adopted it [Airtable], and it is now being rolled out across other schools in the group," she says.
Before Charlotte built her ticketing solution, all internal requests came through instant messaging on Discord and Slack. The friction was real: conversations were fragmented across multiple threads and platforms, and the same request was sometimes sent to two colleagues simultaneously, leading to duplicated work. There was no way to prioritize, estimate workload, or track progress. Requesters had to follow up repeatedly to know the status of their request.
As a team of two handling the same scope across multiple campuses, Charlotte and her colleague had no shared visibility on who was handling what.
"The result: lost time, forgotten tasks, stress, and a constant feeling of being reactive rather than organized," she explains.
Charlotte built a comprehensive ticketing interface entirely within Airtable, integrated with Gmail for notifications. The system guides requesters through a structured submission form that includes a workload indicator showing each team member's current load, so they can assign to the least busy person. Upon submission, the assignee receives an automatic email notification and can review the request in their own personal interface, where they break it into steps, set realistic priorities and deadlines, and estimate time needed.
Estimated time feeds a workload dashboard showing hours due within the next seven days. As work progresses, the assignee updates steps, time spent, time remaining, and completion percentage — all visible to the requester in real time. When complete, the assignee logs actual hours, sets a closure date (used to calculate response time), and changes the status to "To Evaluate." The requester is then notified and evaluates whether their request was fully addressed. If not, the ticket automatically returns to the assignee's queue.
Charlotte chose Airtable for three strategic reasons: most collaborators already use Airtable daily for student management and operations, eliminating any learning curve; native automations allowed her to build email notification workflows directly within Airtable without needing Zapier; and Airtable Interfaces enabled her to create distinct, role-based views that felt intuitive and professional.
📺 Want to see it in action? Charlotte shared a demo of her workflow here:
The Results
Charlotte's ticketing system has already delivered clear improvements across multiple dimensions.
Tasks are completed faster thanks to structured organization, with less context-switching and no lost requests. There's no more back-and-forth in instant messaging to clarify incomplete requests, and zero forgotten tickets: every request now has a status, an owner, and a deadline. Response times are measured automatically from creation to closure.
The team is handling a higher volume of tasks with the same headcount, with better documentation built in — every ticket includes a description, steps, and time tracking. Work is broken into steps, reducing errors and improving quality of delivery.
The solution has also reduced dependency on instant messaging for work requests and eliminated the need for an external ticketing tool license like Jira, Monday, or Asana. Everything stays within the Airtable ecosystem the team already uses daily.
What's Next
Charlotte is planning to build an automation that assigns new tickets to the least loaded team member automatically, removing the manual selection step. She's also exploring smart time tracking to automate time recalculation when remaining hours are updated, and plans to use an Airtable script automation to push new ticket notifications directly to Discord channels for even tighter integration with the team's existing communication workflows.
Did this use case inspire you? Drop a comment below if you've built something similar to organize internal operations, and share how you're using Airtable to change the way you work for a chance to be our next Change Maker spotlight!