Insurance is a core part of any business, big or small. Pie Insurance, founded in 2017, leverages technology to transform how small businesses buy and experience commercial insurance—all with the goal of making it easy as pie.
Conner Church was especially compelled by this mission when he joined Pie Insurance to build workforce management (WFM) from the ground up. Prior to Pie, Conner was doing WFM at eCommerce jewelry company Brilliant Earth. Conner was energized by the opportunity to create Pie’s WFM efforts from scratch, and the company’s culture of cross-functional collaboration and data-driven decision-making aligned well with his own ethos.
When Conner first started, there were 27 agents across four teams—billing, premier, resolution, and policy—and no scheduling or metrics tracking in place. As such, Conner’s first order of business was to create a schedule in Excel and dashboards that displayed productivity metrics in Salesforce. Without schedules, agents were on the phones sporadically with zero understanding of what kind of volume to expect. And without real-time management, there was no visibility into how many calls were in the queue or how long folks were waiting on hold. Initially, Conner tackled real-time management using a spreadsheet—which was not only time-consuming but difficult to track as far as accuracy was concerned.
“Real-time management was done manually. I would comb through every status-code change to give agents credit or no credit, which would take roughly 10 hours per week. Time consuming, but important work.”
Conner Church
Workforce Analyst
Conner used Five9 to get some initial reporting and handle times up and running. It was essential for him to get Pie’s overstaffing under control across phone and email. Despite getting his ducks in a row using homegrown and piecemeal solutions, Conner recognized the need for an actual WFM tool. He also knew it was important to get the entire organization into the WFM mindset. Take adherence, for example: without proper explanation, adherence can sound a tad big brother-ish. Conner and team worked to proactively reframe the conversation from one of surveillance to one of data-driven decision-making that would ultimately make it easier to recognize the team’s good work.
“Scheduling and intraday changes would take at least 20 hours per week in the world of spreadsheets, which is immensely cumbersome.”
Conner Church
Workforce Analyst
Conner set his sights on evaluating WFM tools—with 10 vendors making the initial list, including Assembled. Conner had heard about Assembled through a colleague at Brilliant Earth. For Conner, the criteria for selecting a WFM vendor for Pie Insurance came down to: 1) a user-friendly agent experience that empowered the team with visibility into schedules and key metrics; 2) automated scheduling, intraday changes, and forecasting; and 3) top-notch forecast accuracy.
“We had two categories: user experience for agents and manager/supervisor. The agent experience was highly prioritized. We wanted to make sure agents could see their schedules easily and get an in-depth look at their metrics so they could see how they’re doing in real time without having to wait for their weekly one-on-one meetings.”
Conner Church, Workforce Analyst
After matching their list of 10 contenders, Conner and the Pie Insurance team landed on a shortlist that included Assembled and a few legacy workforce management players. Upon closer inspection, Pie could not move forward with the other solutions due to their convoluted user experience and outdated user interface. None of these solutions had a compatible Salesforce integration, and solving for this would result in added costs.
Ultimately, Conner and the team chose Assembled. With its strong core value of partnership, Assembled built a more compatible Salesforce integration to meet the team’s needs. What’s more, Pie Insurance wasn’t charged extra for the custom build. In fact, Assembled paused billing while getting the integration ready for use. At Assembled, we take our promise of no hidden fees seriously.
Pie Insurance’s implementation of Assembled was quite smooth. The Assembled solutions team was with Conner and his team every step of the way to assist with Salesforce mappings and to get them all to a place of self-sufficiency.
“Assembled’s resource hub and implementation team was immensely helpful with onboarding. Once templates were built and event types created, rolling it out to agents went seamlessly. All they needed to do was connect their Google Calendars. It was also so easy to import agents directly from Five9, and went live the next day.”
Conner Church, Workforce Analyst
After implementation, Conner was able to forecast with much higher accuracy. Variance tightened from 15% to 8%, which resulted in less overstaffing on phone intervals and a gain of 35 productive hours per week. Adherence also increased by 10% across the board. This reduced headcount needs by 10%, saving Pie Insurance roughly $200,000 annually.
“Personally, I have saved roughly 20 hours per week. Assembled also made it so we didn’t need to hire another WFM analyst until late next year, which saved us another $70,000. All in all, we’ve saved at least $300,000 annually with Assembled.”
Conner Church, Workforce Analyst
For Pie Insurance’s small business customers, policies enforced per case dropped by 30%. First call resolution has improved and SLAs have been maintained. Happy customers getting their calls answered quickly, while saving time and resources internally? That’s a win-win situation! With Assembled in place, Conner now has the bandwidth to shift his focus to teams outside the customer support organization and the tools and reporting to empower his teams with coaching.
“The team members and managers love the agent scorecards. It really helps prepping for one-on-one meetings and helps them be self-sufficient. Team performance and agent activity report has been immensely helpful for adherence, as well as productivity and having everything in one place. The real-time dashboard is great—it helps us know which agents are available for transfers.”
Conner Church, Workforce Analyst
Behind every great support team is a simple yet underrated recipe for success: collaboration, team-wide empowerment, and the right set of tools. Pie Insurance makes buying workers’ comp insurance easy as pie for its customers—and Assembled makes WFM easy as pie so Pie Insurance can better serve its mission.
