Belong is a real estate technology company that aims to redefine the home rental experience by providing an end-to-end, seamless process for renters and homeowners. Their platform offers an array of services, including property management, maintenance, and furnishings, making the rental experience more efficient, enjoyable, and personalized.
When Zendesk Admin Anthony Lopez joined Belong, the company was already using Zendesk WFM (formerly known as Tymeshift). But using is probably too strong of a word. Riddled with errors, lags, and an inexplicably unintuitive interface, the Belong team had all but abandoned Zendesk WFM for manual processes — all while continuing to pay for the tool.
Scheduling in Zendesk WFM never worked like it was supposed to. And it was especially challenging when the team tried to schedule in different time zones to account for its agents in the Philippines. With support available 24×7, the team couldn’t risk scheduling snafus in Zendesk WFM and resorted to building schedules in spreadsheets instead.
“Nobody was happy with Tymeshift. The interface wasn’t the greatest — it had a bunch of weird, glitchy things … so it was really prone to errors. It didn’t seem like inputs from the front end were catching up to the back end in a timely manner. It was just not capturing the data correctly.”
Anthony Lopez, Zendesk Admin at Belong
The final straw came when the Belong team started getting billed for agents they had removed from Zendesk. In theory, this should have been automatically updated in Zendesk WFM. But even after deleting these agents directly, Belong continued to see charges for them.
To be clear, the Belong team put a lot of effort into trying to make Zendesk WFM work. Unfortunately, the support was never there. Operating hours were wonky, there was no live chat support, and it would take 3–4 days to get a response over email.
Community Support Manager Tawny Zelenak joined Belong at the tail end of its relationship with Zendesk WFM. She leads the team that supports homeowners and residents when the success managers are unavailable.
“I used Tymeshift for about a month and a half, and I definitely heard about a lot of pain points from my team. If we pulled their scorecards and their reporting, it was frustrating to them because nobody trusted the data.”
Tawny Zelenak, Community Support Manager at Belong
Even prior to Anthony coming aboard, the company had been waiting for its contract with Tymeshift to expire so it could evaluate new software vendors. Soon after he joined, the team was deep into researching a move from Zendesk WFM to another workforce management (WFM) platform.
“The very bare necessity was to get us off of Tymeshift so we wouldn’t even have to worry about spreadsheets.”
Anthony Lopez, Zendesk Admin at Belong
Anthony had prior experience with Agyle Time before it was acquired by Playvox. The team briefly considered Playvox but was deterred by the amount of code and configuration it would require to get things up and running.
After asking around to see what the rest of the team had uncovered through its research, Anthony found that Assembled kept popping up as the number-one contender. He reached out to schedule a demo and quickly realized that Assembled was the team they wanted to partner with.
Finally, a WFM tool that actually works
There were several factors driving Belong’s search and decision-making process, but the number one goal was to find a tool that did what it said it could do — something that wouldn’t be so prone to errors.
After getting a look at Assembled, Anthony and the team had a lot of confidence in the tool. What really sealed the deal was the quality of Assembled’s partnership and customer support.
“Anytime I’ve had to reach out or had issues, Assembled’s support team is really responsive. Even when things took a few weeks to get resolved, the team was proactively reaching out to let me know they were still working on it.”
Tawny Zelenak, Community Support Manager at Belong
After so many ongoing frustrations with scheduling in Zendesk WFM — which eventually drove the Belong team back to spreadsheets — Tawny is thrilled to have a WFM tool with frictionless and intuitive scheduling capabilities.
“Scheduling in Assembled has been a huge time saver. I love that I can create a template and easily make adjustments and update the schedules as needed.”
Tawny Zelenak, Community Support Manager at Belong
From the beginning, Tawny found it very easy to get up and running with Assembled. The tool required limited training for agents and absolutely no code. And if something wasn’t working or making sense, Tawny would just hop on a call with the member of the Assembled team and work through it in real time.
Syncing data from Zendesk was effortless, and the team can trust and validate the data they’re seeing in the Assembled app.
“I definitely feel a lot better about Assembled and the data we’re able to pull. We can pull a lot more … which makes it helpful for coaching and performance management.”
Tawny Zelenak, Community Support Manager at Belong
Prior to implementing Assembled, Belong’s support team had no way to measure adherence. The team used to look to occupancy for clues, but adherence tracking has empowered them to ensure they are available for members when they need support the most.
Tawny spends her days looking at real-time metrics in Assembled, and she appreciates that Assembled allows her agents to participate in taking responsibility for their performance too.
“Having visibility of their scorecards has made things a lot better as far as agent performance goes.”
Tawny Zelenak, Community Support Manager at Belong
Armed with actionable insights that guide both intraday and long-term decision-making, including when to hire more agents, Tawny and the Belong team are happy to have a WFM platform that does the work — no spreadsheets required.
