Blog
by Vanessa Larco and Hilarie Koplow-McAdamsMay 26, 2022
As consumers and businesses today are presented with more choices than ever before, consistently delivering a great customer service experience (CX) has become table stakes. Companies pour significant resources into developing innovative products, maintaining strong brands, and attracting the right users. Unfortunately, despite all of the strategic effort to secure customers there is little tolerance for error—61% of consumers are ready to switch to a company’s competitor after only one bad customer service interaction. The reverse can also be true: one amazing customer experience can leave a lasting impact. With these dynamics in play, it only makes sense that comparable levels of investment should persist post-sale.
At NEA, we’ve been passionate about the opportunities in post-sale for decades and have partnered with several companies focused on transforming how support teams deliver value, including: Uniphore, Forethought, Syllable, Gladly, and Salesforce. We’ve seen the sentiment towards customer support shift as it becomes embedded across the entire customer journey from product discovery to post-purchase. Today, forward-thinking leaders no longer view support as a cost center that needs to be downsized during turbulent times, but rather an interdisciplinary team that drives ongoing conversations with customers, extracts product insights, and introduces new revenue opportunities. Despite the ecosystem of tools that have emerged to automate processes and reduce wait time, people remain paramount to driving customer satisfaction, with 71% of Americans preferring human interaction over a chatbot.
In order to transition customer support from a cost center to a revenue generator, companies need to attract the best support talent and equip them with cutting edge tools to help them prioritize time and improve performance. However, we were shocked to discover that most teams still rely on manual spreadsheets to drive staffing decisions, a practice which is time consuming, error-prone, and inflexible. Over the past two years, the normalization of distributed work and severe labor shortages surfaced even more challenges: agents sitting across multiple time zones and geographies, ticket volumes surging as more people shop online, difficulties of remote performance management, and workers with climbing burnout risk due to added workload and lack of visibility from management.
These unprecedented complexities highlighted the severe need for a flexible, tailored solution, which is why we were so excited when we first learned of what Assembled was building. Assembled is a workforce management platform built to serve customer support teams. Anytime a customer requires live support, Assembled ensures that the right agent is available at the right time. Its platform forecasts staffing needs, automates agent scheduling, provides real-time dashboards, and analyzes team performance. Unlike incumbent solutions such as spreadsheets or legacy workforce management software, Assembled utilizes a data-driven approach to optimizing agent scheduling and performance by analyzing historical trends and unifying data across customer service platforms (Salesforce, Zendesk, Kustomer, Intercom, UJET) and collaboration tools (Google Calendar, Slack). It also differentiates by offering fast onboarding, ease of use for all team members, quick time to value with out-of-the-box solutions, and granular customizations to meet every team’s unique needs. Beyond the clear operational efficiencies that it offers, Assembled promotes a culture of trust and autonomy that attracts the best talent by empowering agents to control their own schedule and managers to guide hiring, staffing, and coaching decisions.
Assembled Co-Founders: Brian Sze, Ryan Wang, and John Wang
As we became more familiar with Assembled, we were deeply impressed by both the team and the customer enthusiasm, which is evidenced through their best-in-class net retention of 200%+. Co-founders Ryan Wang, Brian Sze, and John Wang are forward-thinking, ambitious and truly understand the pain points of rapidly scaling support teams through their experience as early employees of Stripe. They’ve been able to attract well-loved brands such as Etsy, TaskRabbit, Intuit, and Zoom that prioritize their customer relationships, as well as top talent from diverse backgrounds. We are inspired by and proud to partner with Assembled as they empower support teams to make data-driven decisions, deliver delightful experiences, deepen relationships with users, and get back to the fundamentals of CX—people helping people.
The information provided in this blog post is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended to be investment advice, or recommendation, or as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any fund or investment vehicle managed by NEA or any other NEA entity. New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is a registered investment adviser with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). However, nothing in this post should be interpreted to suggest that the SEC has endorsed or approved the contents of this post. NEA has no obligation to update, modify, or amend the contents of this post nor to notify readers in the event that any information, opinion, forecast or estimate changes or subsequently becomes inaccurate or outdated. In addition, certain information contained herein has been obtained from third-party sources and has not been independently verified by NEA. The companies featured in this post are for illustrative purposes only, have been selected in order to provide an example of the types of investments made by NEA that fit the theme of this post and are not representative of all NEA portfolio companies. The company founders or executives or any other individuals featured or quoted in this post are not compensated, directly or indirectly, by NEA but may be founders or executives of portfolio companies NEA has invested in through funds managed by NEA and its affiliates. Any statements made by founders, investors, portfolio companies, or others in the post or on other third-party websites referencing this post are their own, and are not intended to be an endorsement of the investment advisory services offered by NEA.
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