Flexcar is rewriting the rules of car ownership with the first and only month-to-month lease, with insurance and maintenance included. That means no locked-in contracts, no down payments, and the freedom for members to swap cars whenever they want. Today, they serve thousands of active customers across New England, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Nashville — with expansion plans on the horizon to serve even more customers looking for an alternative to traditional leasing or buying.
The challenge
When Lesley Ong, Director of Infrastructure and Strategic Planning, joined Flexcar in 2022, the writing was on the wall: Flexcar needed a true WFM platform. Accurate forecasting, scheduling and real-time performance management across a team of 50 US-based and near-shore agents was crucial for Flexcar. Manning the call center was either expensive, or held the team hostage to traditional call center metrics like 30 seconds SLA or occupancy. As a car company that promises 24/7 roadside assistance, overnight agents "waited all night for maybe four calls spread over eight hours," while agents working the peak intervals risked burn out.
The customer impact was also real. Customers were frustrated when they called for help after business hours, and the only option Flexcar could provide was traditional IVR phone support that redirected customers who were seeking non-emergency roadside services to try again during business hours or to email. In some cases, when these customers are prospects asking "how it works", Flexcar missed the opportunity to give future customers an answer in real time. In parallel, when customers could reach a live agent, there were quality issues, as expected as a growing company with an evolving product:
Initially we saw a bunch of efficiency gains and improved cost per contact from moving [our call center] to Jamaica. But what the company didn't realize at that time was that we are a complex product. We were spending a lot of time on training due to the evolving nature of the product — making sure agents knew each new feature or policy. We spent time training agents on policy correct responses, but not on how to deliver delightful, quality interactions.”
Lesley Ong, Director of Infrastructure and Strategic Planning
Flexcar needed the right agents — capable of delivering empathetic, accurate support — in the right place, at the right time.
Enter Assembled
Flexcar originally came to Assembled in 2023 to address workforce management challenges they were having with a previous vendor. They needed a solution with enterprise capabilities, but startup flexibility. Flexcar’s WFM team was intentionally kept lean, so they needed a user-friendly but feature rich WFM solution. Assembled had the features Flexcar was looking for, and a team that was ready and willing to iterate as needed.
With Assembled WFM, Lesley and her team could focus on their strategic growth plans instead of manually managing the day-to-day. Assembled’s Agent Scorecard provided 100% visibility into agent adherence and productivity, Flexcar was able to reduce the team size to half while still keeping up SLAs. And while they may not have known it in 2023, choosing Assembled for workforce management created the foundation for Flexcar’s AI journey.
Early 2024: AI Agent Copilot
With WFM stabilizing staffing, Flexcar was ready to take the next step in optimizing their operation: maximizing agent productivity with AI assistants. After evaluating alternatives, Flexcar turned to the Assembled AI Copilot to surface knowledge, draft replies, and guide agents through tough cases. Lesley cited the strength of the existing partnership, as well as Assembled’s flexible platform, native integrations, and robust automation capabilities. “The fact that Agent Copilot could sit right on top of Zendesk without being a separate platform and integrate right into tickets was really important,” said Lesley. “So was getting real-time integration with Guru and Flexcar webpages, so we wouldn’t have to retrain agents or the LLM all the time.”
Having workforce management and AI support under one roof was also a major differentiator. It’s not just about having agents handle contacts quicker — it’s about orchestrating the entire operation.”
Lesley Ong, Director of Infrastructure and Strategic Planning
Change management was initially a challenge, and Lesley admitted that the team was suspicious at first; however, the breakthrough came when agents realized they could spend less time on mundane tasks like hunting down documentation and re-drafting replies over and over again. With Copilot, they were empowered to provide fast support — agent productivity per hour doubled, while also reaching a new level of quality in each interaction. That initial skepticism from frontline agents quickly turned into enthusiasm once they saw the value Assist brought. “It shifted once they realized the AI wasn’t replacing them — it was giving them time back to focus on more strategic or complex issues,” said Lesley.
Mid-2024: AI agents for chat, email, and voice
With member volume growing rapidly, Flexcar faced a classic operations challenge: growth without compromise. How do you scale support coverage without inflating headcount or compromising on service quality? How do you make sure agents are focused on high-value interactions — not burned out by repetitive tickets? And how do you architect a support system that flexes with the business, where support is an enabler of growth instead of a bottleneck?
With confidence built through Copilot, the Flexcar team was ready for AI to play a key role in tackling that challenge. They started by expanding into AI agents for chat and email. On the Assembled platform, everything shares the same knowledge, workflows, brand guidelines, and data no matter the channel. That made expanding from human agent-reviewed cases to implementing fully automated workflows “super fast.” Lesley explains further: “That partnership during implementation was really great. And what was super exciting was that as Flexcar was testing out new customer support strategies, more features were constantly being added to Assembled based on our feedback. We felt like we had an AI product that was totally aligned with our needs.”
But the real magic is in the workflows:
Building workflows that mirror how we work, allowing us to give customers what they need instantly, is our biggest win here. And a lot of the workflows we’re creating aren’t just reactive — they’re helping us to sell, convert, and even tee customers up for that final call with a live agent. Enabling AI agents and automations allowed us to expand our reach.”
Lesley Ong, Director of Infrastructure and Strategic Planning
Assembled AI agents can access customer data, trigger external systems, and complete entire resolutions autonomously. Flexcar created automations for complex, multi-step scenarios that would typically require human agents:
- Answering hypothetical questions: Tickets enriched with customer data help answer customer questions that require a consultative response, such as: “If I upgraded my plan and swapped my car, what would my next monthly bill look like?"
- Sending proactive communication: Flexcar pioneered using AI for text message workflows, reaching out conversationally to check on customers. As Lesley described: "We're using AI to ask customers how things are going proactively, but it’s very conversational. We previously tried to launch this program without AI but realized we would have needed to staff up a whole specialized team to manage it. Right now, reviewing and escalating responses is all automated with a live handoff when needed"
- Accessing monthly subscriber agreements: In the past, customers had to email or write in to get their monthly subscriber agreement, which they needed for parking passes. Now, our first task for AI agents is to trigger a workflow to create that PDF and send it to the customer automatically, without having to wait for a human agent to manually trigger a Zapier workflow.
Flexcar's AI agents now handle sophisticated customer interactions with remarkable results. Since launch, email and chat AI agents now achieve a combined 85.56% containment rate — meaning most customers never need human escalation. Daily operations changed almost immediately. “Our agents went from handling every type of contact to focusing on high-value or complex ones,” Lesley explained. “And for the cases that can’t be automated, they’re still able to use AI Copilot to help guide the way.”
With email and chat success proven, Flexcar turned to its ultimate challenge: voice automation and intent based routing for phone calls. It’s paramount that voice AI sounded natural, and could accurately route customers based on intent — traditional IVR models and early speech-to-text models were just frustrating for the customer: “The customers have to listen to a list of options every time they called but most were just smashing numbers on their phone,” Lesley noted.
Enter Assembled’s AI Voice Agents. Capable of conversations that feel human, with the ability to listen, respond and adapt; Assembled’s AI Voice Agent can resolve complex cases end-to-end and knows when to escalate sensitive issues based on what customers say and how they say it.
The results of one team (AI + humans) fully in sync
Flexcar’s first test for ROI is de-staffing the overnight team and allowing customers to self-serve through a combination of voice AI and engagement with the Flexcar app. Lesley and team are already seeing early success with AI agents (email and chat) taking over 30% of incoming volume.
The ultimate goal extends beyond traditional support: By providing 24/7 intelligent support, Flexcar can support existing and potential customers, serving up a personalized experience that builds trust in their new brand and service model around the clock.
Flexcar’s innovative approach to AI goes far beyond operational efficiency — it fundamentally changes support operations from a cost center into a growth engine. The company’s AI journey demonstrates what's possible when every part of your hybrid support team (AI and humans) works together, not in silos.
Strategic transformation
Lesley explained that Flexcar approaches its technology strategy differently, leveraging an AI-human hybrid model, with an achievable focus on non-linear scaling. Their strategy is three-pronged:
- Contain and resolve low-complexity issues automatically
AI Assistants introduced across chat, voice, and email to handle common questions—like billing cycles, pickup logistics, and common membership policies—without agent involvement. These aren’t static scripts, but leveraged real-time data to personalize responses based on the customer’s journey. - Elevate agent work through smart routing and summarization
Flexcar is adamant about not using AI as a blocker from support, so Assembled is instructed to always allow hand off when handoff is needed, but intelligently. When escalation is needed - routed based on intent and urgency, and deliver concise summaries to agents to reduce context-switching and handling time. - Orchestrate everything in one operational view
To ensure visibility and accountability, Flexcar aligned AI and human performance under a single reporting framework, combining WFM tools, AI dashboards, and quality monitoring systems.
Operational intelligence
The unified platform gives Flexcar unprecedented visibility into its operations: “Before, it was painstakingly manual to listen to all these calls to try to understand any deltas from the forecast,” Lesley explained. “Now if we see a spike in the Forecast in the WFM tool, we can quickly review interaction summaries to see what customers are calling in for and report on contact drivers. When our product teams roll out a change, it’s easy to measure the impact. When marketing experiments with a big promotion we see early indicators of ROI and the cost to serve.”
Cultural evolution
“Our agents no longer start every conversation at zero,” Lesley said. “They’re handed summaries, context, and only the cases that truly require them. That changes the entire dynamic." The expectations for the team transformed completely:
Overall expectations are different now. We're not just looking for someone that types fast enough. We're looking for accuracy and overall quality — the ability to build a relationship with customers. Not just finding the customer’s account, answering and then moving on to the next ticket.”
Lesley Ong, Director of Infrastructure and Strategic Planning
The same customer context – in the form of ticket tags, interaction summaries, real-time slack alerts, and Assembled Chat to peruse a customer's account history – is also shared with Flexcar’s product, engineering, and other internal teams — enabling everyone at Flexcar to be a customer experience advocate, and allowing customers to benefit from borderless time to resolution.
Board-level impact
The business impact reaches the highest levels: "Now, we approach reporting differently — we track how many contacts were handled by a live agent and how many were contained and handled by AI. Before, those lines would have never existed. But now, it’s one of the things our leadership team is most interested in.”
Ultimately, Flexcar's journey shows what's possible for the future of support. Lesley reflected: "Most companies have teams that do all of this quantitative analysis to see how the customer is doing... but what we know is that what drives customers to rave about a product, or even leave a bad review, is less predictable — It’s more emotional," She continues:
Before AI, it required very manual processes to get those insights. But now with Assembled, we can leverage all of the data that we're getting from customer interactions. Customer experience leaders now have the keys to all these valuable insights that we can then share with the business. It fundamentally changes the role and the impact that CX has on all business operations.”
Lesley Ong, Director of Infrastructure and Strategic Planning
This is the true power of Assembled's unified platform: it doesn't just make support more efficient; it elevates customer support to a strategic differentiator.
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