What if we told you that one of the most popular features of Assembled is actually kinda, sorta outside the product? You read that right.
Some companies work tirelessly to keep you inside their product for as long as possible, and for it to be the one place you spend your waking, working hours. We have a different, more realistic take on things — your best work happens when and where you're helping customers, and our job is to make that happen (even if that means spending less time in Assembled).
As for the Most Popular Feature (used by >90% of customers) and how we've made it extra, extra, extra special in this month's launch? Drumroll: it's our Google Calendar integration! Read on to learn why it's so beloved, how it helps agents stay in focus mode, and the sunshine, puppies, and rainbows we've added to make the experience even better.
Assembled → Google Calendar = ✨✨✨
When first building Assembled, we challenged ourselves to address the thorn in nearly every support team's side: coordinating who's doing what, when, and where. This is more painful than it sounds, but if you know, you know. For some, it meant searching through hard-to-read spreadsheets or checking Slack for scheduling updates, and for others, it meant manually creating events for themselves in Google Calendar every single day. Rough.
Time-consuming, error-prone, confusing, and overcomplicated. These were just some of the choice words used to describe the work-arounds used by support teams to view and manage their schedules. Enter the Google Calendar integration. This allows you to sync your Assembled schedule directly to your Google Calendar. Synced! Directly! Automatically! This means...
- Any event created in Assembled is synced to a separate calendar in Google Calendar (called the "Assembled Calendar"), which is great for teams who prefer separation between support events and other meetings on their primary calendar.
- Or if you prefer, every event that's created in Assembled can be synced to your primary Google Calendar, which means everything is in one place, from your support schedule to 1:1s to other meetings. We meet you where you already are.
A customer told us this was a "game-changer for their workflow", in part because agents didn't need to do as much context-switching to know where they needed to be, and when.
Next, making Google Calendar → Assembled = 💌💌💌
Any scheduling tool, even one designed to work for a whole team, can feel like it's out of the loop or living under the schedule-equivalent of a rock if it can't talk to the outside world. At the heart of our Google Calendar integration is a recognition that coordination often happens outside of Assembled. From the start, we made sure meetings scheduled in Google Calendar were synced back in Assembled, so managers had deep visibility into their agents' days and could schedule around important non-support meetings without having to double-back to Google Calendar or check with an agent directly.
The question on the table for this month's launch: how could we ensure that the Google Calendar integration works so well that it makes the Assembled experience even better? The answer is actually in the details. We've addressed several tricky technical details to make the interaction between Assembled and Google Calendar seamless.
Map Google Calendar events for structured reporting!
Scheduling with Assembled is useful for many reasons, chief among them because it gives you access to structured reports on how your team is spending its time. When paired with Google Calendar, you get the full picture, inclusive of activities that come from outside Assembled. This is all made possible by event mapping, which enables you to categorize certain keywords or phrases — for example, events with "1:1", "Standup", or "Team Meeting" in the title could all be matched to a single "Meeting" event so that you or your team can get a handle on how much time is spent in meetings.
Know where your event came from!
When you're moving across two calendars (Assembled and Google Calendar), it's important for certain users, like managers, to have a solid grasp on where events originated, and to have a direct link back to the original event. This helps them and others look at schedules in the proper context before moving events or scheduling over.
Ensure future events are synced!
Now, customers don't need to think twice about whether a future event will flow into Assembled. Events scheduled up to a year in advance will be waiting for you in Assembled, when that day comes!
Stop the accidental event delete before it happens!
For customers who know the pain of accidental schedule deletion or a spreadsheet input error, we've disabled editing and deleting of Google Calendar-created events from within Assembled, which helps prevent the understandable user error. If you need to remove the event from Assembled without deleting it entirely, you're now able to do this easily by removing the Assembled Calendar email from the event in Google Calendar.
At the end of the day, we don't care where you do your work, but we do want to be the reason you and your team gets your best work done. Here's to seamless scheduling and happier customers!
