Assembled is a great fit for rapidly-changing organizations. It provides us with a powerful global view of net staffing that helps us balance our network of globally distributed offices.
Teague O’Connell, Head of workforce management
The challenge: Fast response times in a modern team environment
Before Assembled, we didn’t have much insight into staffing across our distributed support office. It’s been like adding another workforce manager to my team.
Adrien Seldon, Workforce manager
Stripe support started as most modern support teams do—with a small, talented team working together in the same room to deliver a great customer experience. As Stripe rapidly grew, it strained to preserve this experience while aggressively adding email, phone and chat support coverage—available 24x7—to all of its customers. To keep pace, Stripe invested early in a global support operation. Today, Stripe’s team includes 1,000 people distributed across 13 offices in various time zones, supporting an expanding array of products. At the center of this operation is Stripe’s Workforce Management group—a small but mighty team of 5—responsible for optimizing staffing so that Stripe users receive fast, responsive support.
This is a nearly impossible task without the right tools—especially given Stripe’s ever-expanding product suite. To create a staffing plan, Adrien Seldon would manually calculate the number of people needed for each channel and specialization per half-hour interval in a spreadsheet. He would then share the relevant requirements with each Stripe’s 13 support offices, who would build team schedules in response. Finally, he would compile each office’s plans to compare against his own master spreadsheet. While this process yielded a powerful map of the global Stripe workforce, it required days of manual work to compile data for a single week.
Instead of focusing on the big picture, I spent too much of my day-to-day bogged down in a lot of manual work and chasing down team schedules.
Adrien Seldon, Workforce manager
Adrien also lacked meaningful real-time visibility into Stripe’s 13 support offices, compared to the schedules meticulously prepared by each office. This was an especially critical gap given Stripe’s ambitious targets in response times for chat and phone support, and burgeoning premium support product. He found existing tools insufficient for his needs.
The realtime tools I’ve used other places are not very user-friendly, and often break because of bad integrations.
Adrien Seldon, Workforce manager
Even basic analysis — for example, investigating an unexpected uptick in wait times—required tedious work, forcing him to log into multiple platforms and reconciling team activities against the schedules in his staffing spreadsheet.
By the time I figured out where the gaps were in staffing, it was too late and we couldn’t take action.
Adrien Seldon, Workforce manager
With Assembled, Stripe now has end-to-end visibility into worldwide staffing at its fingertips.
We now have a holistic way to understand our team resourcing and how it’s being used - and it provided a platform to make it easier to have conversations around how to improve our staffing coverage.
Teague O’Connell, Head of workforce management
Stripe's workforce management team uses Assembled to set requirements across over 50 specializations, support channels and offices. Each office delivers schedules to Stripe in one of two ways: they can schedule directly within Assembled, or they can deliver schedules to Assembled via API. Because the process is streamlined in one place, Stripe now builds and tracks granular staffing plans for months into the future.
For offices choosing to use Assembled directly, managers take advantage of our powerful scheduling workflows — honed after auditing the scheduling processes of over 100 modern support teams — to rapidly build staffing plans for Adrien to track. Team leads quickly learn how to use Assembled to monitor daily progress and make any necessary changes to the schedule, as they face the reality of the work week.
We’ve been impressed by how quickly people pick up Assembled without much guidance from us. The scheduling interface is intuitive and easy to learn.
Adrien Seldon, Workforce manager
In all cases, Adrien now has timely, accurate visibility into worldwide staffing, and can proactively guide Stripe’s team of 1000+ agents to achieve target response times and staffing goals.
Furthermore, Assembled’s realtime dashboard gives Adrien visibility into the immediate state of support, to quickly address any bubbling issues. In one dashboard, he views team performance — SLA, wait times, backlog — and can track it against actual agent activity states versus the originally planned schedule. Each office accesses their own customized view of this dashboard, so that they can work collaboratively to fix any issues that arise throughout the day.
I can now check at a glance when people are supposed to be scheduled, and cross-check their actual status. This is crucial since we don’t want users waiting too long for a phone call or chat response.
Adrien Seldon, Workforce manager
