[HN Gopher] Show HN: Assembled - Scale great customer support
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Show HN: Assembled - Scale great customer support
Author : johnjwang
Score : 98 points
Date : 2020-03-11 16:28 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.assembled.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.assembled.com)
| michaelschade wrote:
| 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 :)
| johnjwang wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words! We've definitely seen a ton of small
| companies that started out with spreadsheets and internal
| tools. That's why we wanted to mimic the ease of use of Google
| Sheets while providing out-of-the box features that support
| teams usually ask for, like forecasting.
| arciini wrote:
| 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!
| johnjwang wrote:
| These are definitely the kinds of problems we're trying to
| solve. We've been working with our launch customers to get
| their whole company to understand the tradeoffs involved in
| customer support.
|
| It's actually very hard to have both fast response times and
| high occupancy (the percentage of your team's time actually
| spent answering tickets). Often a company wants both, but it's
| hard to convince people that you can't have both. We've helped
| our early customers show this by actually planning different
| scenarios out.
| av64 wrote:
| Congrats on the official announcement! Here's to your success!
| mlm wrote:
| This looks great, but it's also focused on people--what happens
| when more and more support is done via AI?
| codezero wrote:
| For now, AI is working as a good deflection in front of the
| workforce. I think that will continue and get a lot better over
| time, but will likely still just be a combination of deflection
| in the front, as well as enablement for agents by giving some
| good summary resources that may make responding faster.
|
| Neither of those removes the workforce at scale in my opinion.
|
| Also, AI is real far away from replacing more advanced support
| teams doing "tier 2" and "tier 3" support which require a lot
| more work outside of the email/chat thread.
| johnjwang wrote:
| +1, very much agree with this. AI-driven chatbots are a piece
| of the puzzle for many of our users -- they cover commonly
| asked questions and can deflect a lot of questions. But it's
| still just a portion of the work (even if a majority of
| volume). For example, a lot of "hard" support questions
| involve jumping between systems and following complicated
| (often nonexistent) procedures, even aside from models that
| understand intent.
|
| Also to be fair to our team, we do have a bunch of problems
| that we no longer think of as AI, but are still super
| algorithm-intensive: forecasting, modeling of queues, and
| schedule optimization.
| mkx wrote:
| 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?
| johnjwang wrote:
| Thanks, and that's a great question! We're targeting companies
| with 10 or more support agents. More generally, we're best for
| companies who are starting to see some amount of complexity in
| their customer support. Some examples include: if you're
| launching phone/chat/realtime support, if you have multiple
| specializations in your support team, if you're extending hours
| to the weekends.
|
| Most smaller teams can get away with 9am-5pm weekday support
| for quite a while. However, once you have enough volume where
| you need to start staffing weekends or staffing earlier/later
| in the day, it becomes a lot harder to manage your team and
| that's where Assembled comes in.
| johnjwang wrote:
| 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/
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