The challenge: Supporting an expanding set of telehealth services amidst the sudden transition to distributed work
Ro aims to put you in control of your health, integrating telehealth, diagnostics, and pharmacy services together to deliver a personalized healthcare experience. When COVID-19 first spread around the world in early 2020, Ro took action. They launched a free, dedicated telehealth assessment, allowing people to seek guidance regarding the signs and symptoms of the novel coronavirus from the safety of their home. This proved so popular that they were even featured on Justin Bieber’s Twitter account.
With their expanded set of services, including new offerings like Plenity and Ro Pharmacy, came an influx in support volume and the need to grow the support team to keep up with demand. Like organizations across the world, Ro was also in the midst of switching to a fully distributed staffing model. The combination meant that managing support operations at Ro had become simultaneously more difficult and more important.
Despite the unprecedented circumstances, Ro still needed to staff their day-to-day operations through the ebbs and flows in incoming volume to continue to serve both their new and existing customers. Fundamentally, they needed accurate forecasting and scheduling more than ever. Ro’s previous platform, WhenIWork, was simply a way of relaying schedules to the team and left them wanting more insight into their operations without knowing exactly what they needed.
Assembled has given us insight into how efficient and how well-staffed we are. I don't think we even knew we needed these metrics until we had Assembled.
Breanne McCormick, Strategy and Reporting for Care
In order to have granular visibility into how the team spent their time, Ro’s reporting lead would previously look at the number of hours that associates worked in a day (9am-5pm phone hours), subtract their lunch hour, and divide their total productivity. With this approach, though, Ro also wasn’t able to see how much time they were losing to meetings or the impact of company events like an all-hands on productivity.
We never had anything like Assembled’s forecasting. Previously, our staffing was based on looking at volume week-over-week. The volume forecasting is pretty spot-on, and it's been super helpful for day-to-day staffing as well as long-term hiring, which is something we had not previously fleshed out.
Breanne McCormick, Strategy and Reporting for Care
As they scaled—and especially for an influx in volume like that from COVID-19—Ro needed greater access to sophisticated forecasting and insight into associate adherence.
Assembled provides Ro with more than a scheduling tool, enabling robust support operations throughout the transition to distributed work.
Assembled allows us to do so many things our particular operation depends on. Staffing plays a big role in how we do everything; we can’t do anything if nobody shows up.
Veroneque, Member Experience Lead
With Assembled, Ro now has a hub for their support operations. Assembled gives Ro access to forecasting, insight into productivity and adherence, and access to real-time scheduling updates via Google Calendar. As the team has transitioned fully to distributed work, Ro now has the data and the insight needed to make informed staffing decisions.
For example, it enables them to confidently make last-minute decisions when changing their schedule across sites. Previously, this process was based solely on the intuition of team leads—today, team leads are supported by Assembled’s real-time reporting. Assembled’s hourly breakdowns help Breanne in particular. With access to this granular data, she has a more complete understanding of the day, ultimately helping the whole team get to the bottom of problems quickly.
Breanne is now able to stay on top of the daily metrics that matter to the team like Ro's trailing-day volume, the team's responsiveness to customers, and the number of hours the team covered for a given day. For goals with longer timeframes, she's able to look at month-to-date data to see how they're tracking against their goals. She's then able to compile this data—along with other measures, including forecasts for the future—into weekly and monthly decks for the leadership team that break down productivity, the team's total hours, and how those hours were spent.
Many of the processes we have now are built out of the capabilities of Assembled. We used to just have 'productive hours.' Now we know exactly when someone's on break or working on phones.
Breanne McCormick, Strategy and Reporting for Care
New challenges have of course arisen over time but with Assembled's processes in place, it's only a matter of figuring out how to make the necessary changes, not which changes are necessary in the first place. When the pandemic pushed Ro to create more flexible shift options (such as taking a longer break in the middle of the day), Assembled’s adherence monitoring proved invaluable. Adherence in this environment is a challenge but the in-depth reporting Assembled offers has not only provided team leads with the data they need, it’s even changed the conversation around accountability on the team.
There's no room for miscommunication with Assembled's adherence reports. The insight from the schedule breakdown has changed accountability on the team.
Breanne McCormick, Strategy and Reporting for Care
