Today, we’re announcing our latest round of funding and more importantly, acknowledging the Customer Experience (CX) community that has and will continue to power us forward. We cannot thank you enough for your enthusiasm, feedback, and support along the way.
As early employees at Stripe, Brian, John, and I worked with many incredible companies that created great products and brought big ideas to life. But, perhaps surprisingly, our work wasn’t necessarily about big ideas. Our days were consumed with the nitty-gritty stuff that came after, like stopping fraud or delivering exceptional customer support.
CX, or customer support, is the function that best encapsulates this theme of what comes after the big idea. In many companies, it’s the biggest roadblock between mission and reality. How often have you used a product or service that works flawlessly for everyone at all times? And how often has support failed or frustrated you when you’ve needed help? We’re convinced that companies can’t automate this all away, and they definitely can’t just hire more people until the problem fixes itself—certainly not in a world of staffing shortages, distributed work, and (gulp) potential recession.
Enter Assembled, as well as a compounding set of somewhat specific questions. How do you staff a phone line that requires immediate response? How do you organize an operation that crosses multiple offices, time zones, or is perhaps fully-distributed? How do you ensure your organization is behaving efficiently, balancing the needs of the business with the needs of people that work there? We believe the answer is in empowering everyone in the support organization, and entrusting them to make smart decisions in the best interests of the broader team. Not controlling or, worse yet, replacing them. From the beginning, it’s been about helping the people doing the hard, unglamorous work that comes with dreaming big.
As we make progress, we’re also daring to think bigger. We view support as a stand-in for a broader mission—to build technology that solves for everything that comes after the big idea. There are countless people-powered functions—fulfillment, manufacturing, nursing, and retail, just to name a few—that rhyme with support. Without them, innovations would never make it to the masses. Consider flight. How amazing must it have been to learn about the Wright Brothers’ first flight? And yet, most of our modern experience with flight involves waiting in line(s). We need technology to fix delays, inefficiency, and bureaucracy just as much as we need new inventions.
Back to customer support. It’s a special community full of smart, caring, creative, and curious people. From the part-time comedians to the aspiring actors to the future product leaders, our users inspire us with their shared desire to learn, grown, and enrich themselves well beyond their day job. There’s Hunter, an early friend of Assembled. After dropping out of school and taking on a job as a support agent at a vendor site, he eventually worked his way into an incredibly critical project management role at one our early customers—all without a traditional resume, fancy accolades, or shiny degrees. He’s just one of countless examples we’ve seen of the untapped talent in CX.
So, with our latest round of funding [led by NEAª, and joined by existing investors Emergence Capital and Basis Set Ventures], we’re investing in our product and company as well as our community. We’re launching CX Scholars, which commits a percentage of annual revenue to the continued education of those in the support and WFM community. This program is designed to encourage rising CX leaders to learn business fundamentals and technical skills that can help accelerate their careers while also benefiting their teams. More than anything, we want to give people the time and resources they deserve to focus on professional development. To be notified when applications open up, sign up here.
As always, we’re committed to making your experience with Assembled as seamless, delightful, and helpful as possible. Thank you for allowing us the chance to support you in your ever-important missions, and for your patience and trust in us as we continue evolving the product to meet the needs of today. And of course, thank you for the work you do to make your customers happy. We know it isn’t always easy, but we aim to be there with you every step of the way.
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1We’re also delighted to welcome Vanessa Larco and Hilarie Koplow-McAdams as board member and board observer respectively, alongside existing (and amazing) board member Jake Saper (Emergence Capital). As product and go-to-market leaders that have seen and done it before, we’re proud to have them on our team.
