Robinhood is a pioneering financial services platform that democratizes access to the investing world. Because they are responsible for handling their customers’ assets, customer support is much more than a box to check — it’s a mission-critical function that’s expected to deliver high-quality, expedient, and empathetic experiences when customers need them.
As Robinhood’s support operations partner since 2020, Assembled has witnessed the company’s rapid maturation firsthand. In that time, Assembled collaborated closely with Robinhood on its journey to becoming a publicly traded company (powered by a multi-vendor, multi-channel, and multi-product CX operation). Throughout three years of tremendous growth, a strong two-way partnership has defined every chapter.
“We are deeply appreciative of all the work the Assembled team has put into understanding our challenges and partnering closely to build solutions as we rapidly scaled our support operations. With Assembled, we can see the tangible benefits of our feedback as we efficiently deliver a world-class customer support experience in an omnichannel environment.”
Robert Robles, Senior Director of Global Outsourcing and Product Operations Management at Robinhood
Chapter 1: Fueling a world-class support engine
As Robinhood’s user base and popularity grew throughout the 2010s, the company recognized a critical need to offer its customers access to live support channels. Part of the company’s mission back then included a commitment to being there for customers when they needed them. But in the absence of a proper workforce management tool, email was the only support channel available to Robinhood’s customers at the time.
When the team first began evaluating workforce management solutions, they were discouraged by traditional platforms that were clearly built for call center environments. In fact, they felt their situation was so underserved that they first tried to build a homegrown solution internally with engineers and data scientists.
As a pioneering workforce management solution purpose-built for omnichannel customer support, Assembled was an ideal match for Robinhood’s complex support needs. Through a combination of the Assembled platform’s standard functionality and the team’s hands-on, partnership-first approach to working with customers, Assembled enabled Robinhood to retire the spreadsheets it had been using to manage hundreds of agents and begin offering live chat and phone support.
”Assembled was the catalyst for transforming our customer support into the highly efficient, highly responsive operation it is today. We are now better equipped to show up for our customers when and where they need us. Plus, we have access to the insights we need to make continual improvements.”
Amir El-Baghdady, Head of Workforce Management and Performance Analytics for Customer Care at Robinhood
Chapter 2: Co-creating a vendor management platform
Robinhood partners with multiple business process outsourcing (BPO) vendors around the world to ensure its customers have access to exceptional around-the-clock support. But like many companies with outsourced operations, Robinhood struggled with manual processes and a lack of visibility into vendor productivity and spend.
With no single source of truth to track vendor staffing and performance holistically, it was difficult to proactively identify staffing deficits and overages across their BPO vendor network and resolve billing discrepancies. The team was spending countless hours in cumbersome spreadsheets to drive their staffing and billing workflows and needed a solution that would drive efficiencies and improve vendor data accuracy.
After pattern-matching similar needs with other Assembled customers, the team leaned on Robinhood as a go-to partner to design and deliver a solution that addressed the pain points so many others were facing. Armed with a deep understanding of their BPO-related pain points, needs, and ideas, Assembled spent several months working with Robinhood’s vendor management team to develop a first-of-its-kind platform that would serve as a single source of truth for BPO vendor staffing processes.
Says Assembled co-founder and CEO Ryan Wang: “This reflects the strength of our partnership with the Robinhood team, and the perfect example of how customers can drive important product innovation through critical feedback.”
The shared goal? Help Robinhood boost overall efficiency and optimize vendor spend by reducing spreadsheet reliance, providing real-time views of staffing data, and giving them the visibility needed to reward top-performing vendors with more hours. Since implementing Assembled for Vendor Management, Robinhood has improved staffing efficiency across its vendor network, which translates to a massive reduction in annual BPO vendor costs. Additionally, the platform has greatly enhanced team efficiencies by deprecating cumbersome spreadsheets and workflows and improving real-time data access across teams for leveraged decision-making.
“Assembled for Vendor Management gives me real-time data on our BPOs’ schedules, shrinkage, adherence, and more — visibility I never had before. I can now see months ahead, gain insights to optimize our budget, and ensure maximum coverage during peak periods.”
Beau Burton, Senior Vendor Relationship Manager at Robinhood
(Partnering) to the moon and beyond
There’s no denying just how remarkable the Robinhood journey has been and continues to be. Today, the platform serves more than 10 million monthly active users with assets totaling $90 billion under custody — a 4.5× increase from the assets Robinhood was safekeeping just three years ago.
Prior to teaming up with Assembled, Robinhood’s accessible, user-friendly platform empowered individuals to trade stocks, ETFs, options, and popular cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Since then, Assembled’s staff forecasting capabilities have been critical to supporting Robinhood’s expansion into new product offerings — including IPO Access, which allows users to buy shares of companies at their IPO price before the stock is listed on exchanges, and Robinhood Retirement, an IRA for gig workers and contractors. This rapid expansion into new products reflects the company’s ambition to serve as a one-stop shop for retail investors.
Through it all, Assembled remains focused on maintaining Robinhood’s commitment to world-class support. Looking forward, there’s endless potential as Robinhood paves the way for retail investors to access commission-free investing opportunities. To the moon!
