from Hacker News

Show HN: Assembled – Scale great customer support

by johnjwang on 3/11/20, 4:28 PM with 15 comments

  • by michaelschade on 3/11/20, 7:55 PM

    This is fantastic. I started Stripe's support team, built out our version of an internal tools team, and have since advised a bunch of mid-range startups on how to scale operations. Every company I've talked to is trying to figure out how to improve response times, but really lacks visibility into when load is coming in -- and especially any visibility into when it will come in.

    The technical solution to modeling this out and providing more advanced forecasting is super interesting, and the product itself looks delightful to use (more than the spreadsheets our early support team used to be buried in navigating, at least :)

  • by johnjwang on 3/11/20, 4:31 PM

    Hi HN,

    I'm John, one of the co-founders of Assembled. Our mission is to transform and elevate customer support.

    Today we’re launching a product that solves workforce management and helps support teams get staffing right. For the past two years, we’ve been building it alongside some of the most innovative support teams in the world like Slack, Stripe, and Harry’s.

    Sam Altman’s startup playbook says: “great startups always have great customer service in the early days” [0], but he doesn’t talk about the later days. It turns out to be really hard to scale great support with spreadsheets and internal tools. We’ve built Assembled after talking to hundreds of different organizations that have been trying to solve this problem.

    Our product tackles three core operational challenges:

    - Forecasting: We automatically forecast support volume and translate it into the right staffing plan.

    - Scheduling: We provide an intuitive team calendar that works across time zones and/or multiple specializations.

    - Unified metrics: We make support schedules and metrics, like response times, visible across all levels.

    Assembled is available today and you can request a demo here. We’ll be around all day answering questions, so feel free to comment here or email me directly at john@assembled.com.

    [0] https://playbook.samaltman.com/

  • by mkx on 3/11/20, 7:00 PM

    Congrats on the launch! What's the minimum number of support agents do companies need to have before you're a good fit for them? Or how do you think about what a qualified customer looks like?

  • by arciini on 3/11/20, 5:07 PM

    This is really cool! I'm working with a customer support team and getting the right amount of staffing was always a challenge. To really reliably have good support with low wait times for 95% of the time, you'd end up being overstaffed by quite a bit for >50% of the time.

    In addition, just communicating with everyone about shifts and managing the people-side was also a challenge, and there never felt to be super-specialized tools for this.

    Accurate staffing seems like precisely the kind of problem that good data and modeling could solve. Good communication is something that good UI design could solve too. I'm excited to see how this works!

  • by mlm on 3/11/20, 8:50 PM

    This looks great, but it's also focused on people—what happens when more and more support is done via AI?

  • by av64 on 3/11/20, 8:49 PM

    Congrats on the official announcement! Here's to your success!

  • by dolodort on 3/12/20, 3:44 AM

    This is superb! Such great work to see.