A Series B funding round was led by New ENTERPRISE ASSOCIATES with participation from Emergence CAPITAL and BASIS SET VENTURES. Ryan Wang says that the new capital will be put toward product development, including schedule maximization and integrations with HR software, as well as launching an initiative that will commit a percentage of Assembled's revenue to continuing education for support workers.
Customer support organizations were faced with both increased customer requests and work-from- home challenges because of the Pandemic. According to a survey by a tech vendor who has a horse in the race, 70% of people think it's harder to reach a real person now than it was during the beginning of the epidemic. According to The Quality Assurance and Training Connection, the average annual turnover rate for U.S. contact center agents is 30% to 45%.
Wang doesn't argue that Assembled is a cure-all, but he does argue that the platform can ease the burden on support workers. Wang co-founded the company with Brian and John, both of whom he worked with at Stripe.
Ryan Wang told TechCrunch in an email interview that they observed the support function transform rapidly into a complex, geographically dispersed operation. As companies pay closer attention to how they staff, organize, and provide greater empowerment and flexibility to their agents, this has provided tailwinds to our business. Digital transformation has been good for us. On the one hand, there is a rise of new, digital-first brands and on the other hand, there is a rise of traditional brands building their businesses.
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Predicting and preparing for customer calls, texts, and emails through a range of forecasting and scheduling techniques is what assembled attempts to do. The platform draws on historical support tickets to anticipate future volumes of customer requests. Simulation models project how things like email delays might evolve under different staffing conditions, while the same models create schedules respecting rules such as the length of shifts, the amount of time between shifts, and the amount of flexibility at a shift's start.
Managers using Assembled can make their own schedules if they so choose. They can see metrics like response time and service levels.
Some contact center platforms have recently been accused of coercive surveillance, for example forcing remote employees to install cameras in their homes to check whether they are staying on task. According to Assembled, it doesn't offer any such features and allows clients to remove any user data that it stores.
According to Ryan Wang, Assembled looks to encourage rising customer experience leaders to learn business basics and other skills to advance their careers while benefiting their teams. The selection and awarding process of the program is still being worked out, and we are gathering intel from our user community to get a more precise sense of what kinds of education and networking opportunities are the most popular.
Ryan Wang thinks that Assembled is competing with solutions from spreadsheets to pure scheduling tools such as WhenIWork and Tymshift. He asserts that legacy tools were built for a different era and that most scheduling tools are aimed at simpler environments.
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The technology used to organize people in the contact center industry is outdated and has been around for more than 20 years. How do you staff a phone line that requires prompt response? How do you organize an operation that spans multiple offices and time zones? Ryan Wang said that the modern support team must answer these questions while providing flexibility and a trusting environment to the people representing their brands. In a world of staffing shortages and distributed work, we help companies solve the tricky people logistics problems associated with delivering great support.
Over the past few years, Assembled has grown its client base to more than 180 enterprises and formed partnerships with brands like Restaurant Brands International and TaskRabbit. To stay ahead of the pack, Ryan Wang says that Assembled will build out new products tailored to trust and safety, fulfillment, and IT help desk scenarios and open a New York office with plans to expand in the Asia-Pacific region and Europe.
Assembled has grown by 4x in the last year. Ryan Wang said that the team will be doubled by the end of the year.
San Francisco, California-based Assembled has raised over $65 million.
With all of the resources and focus companies pour into product development and sales, it is critical for customer retention. More and more companies are paying attention to delivering great customer experience, which was born out of experience with scaling support teams at Stripe. Ryan Wang and his team are passionate about helping support teams. The team's combination of experience, technical-capability, and passion really grabbed our attention and we believe they are the right company to help solve the rising challenges enterprises face with customer experience management.
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