Thrasio is on an ambitious mission to reimagine how the world’s most loved products become accessible to everyone. Using data science, Thrasio surfaces the most beloved brands and partners with entrepreneurs to offer even better paths to seamless scalability.
With its commitment to providing an exceptional experience to its customers, Thrasio’s support team is aptly named Global Services, with teams across four continents. Gershwin Exeter leads the team as vice president, overseeing customer experience for the entire organization with help from his direct reports Beaver Ulgasan, Erin Jiang, Stefan Promoroca, and Marvin Hernandez, along with Insights Manager Nobuhiro Kobayashi.
Prior to Assembled, everything was done in spreadsheets. With no workforce management (WFM) tool in place, there were no automations and no centralization of data.
“Creating a forecast manually would take over a week — and with revisions, more than 2 weeks. The process also tended to be error-prone given that it was manual.”
Nobuhiro Kobayashi
Insights Manager
Schedules were created based on agent preferences rather than customer needs, which meant staffing was completely non-optimized. A majority of Thrasio’s customer contact volume would occur between 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. ET, yet most agents were scheduled between 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. ET where there was little to no work.
As a result of randomized staffing, Thrasio’s backlog snowballed to over 10,000 conversations. First response time for email was, on average, 26 hours; and as a result of the longer turnaround time, customer inquiries were skyrocketing. Tracking any type of SLA? Forget it. Data from the team’s contact platforms was not optimized for operational efficiency.
Thrasio had roughly 160 frontline agents, with plans to scale to over 350 by the end of the 2021. To manage the chaos and track north-star metrics such as SLA and CSAT, it was clearly time for Thrasio to implement a WFM tool.
Thrasio required a WFM solution that would integrate seamlessly with Zendesk and Salesforce. More importantly, Thrasio wanted to work with a partner that would prioritize and honor long-term partnership. After a few conversations, the decision came down to Assembled and one of its competitors. Thrasio chose Assembled.
“We quickly realized Thrasio and Assembled are very like minded. It didn’t feel like a formal client relationship — it felt like we were working with someone we already knew.”
Marvin Hernandez
Senior Manager, Global Services
Thrasio’s implementation of Assembled was quite smooth. The Assembled Solutions Team was with Thrasio every step of the way — from configuration to agent rollout.
“Assembled’s Solutions Team ensured that we had trustworthy data and really took the time to invest in a stellar partnership. They were available to answer any question or work through any technical issue.”
Marvin Hernandez
Senior Manager, Global Services
Thanks to Assembled’s seamless one-click integrations with Zendesk and Salesforce, Thrasio can now automate forecasting — saving over 2 weeks of manual work and eliminating data inaccuracies. What’s more, Assembled’s forecasting capabilities worked right out of the box, pulling in Thrasio’s historical data. Thrasio has seen forecast variance tighten to roughly 5–10% across all channels — resulting in even more optimized staffing across the board.
By optimizing its workforce, Thrasio avoided hiring 190 additional frontline agents. Through a combination of planning, automations, employee development, and process improvements, Thrasio was able to optimize its existing team.
Thrasio’s CSAT increased to an industry-leading 4.4, with first response time hovering around 42 minutes — representing a massive improvement from 26 hours.
With adherence, real-time management, and team performance metrics, the Thrasio team now has the data it needs to effectively coach agents, allocating 5 hours of dedicated employee development per person per month. Assembled has also enabled Thrasio to track adherence for the first time, which has been tremendously helpful in identifying areas of opportunity for agents’ workflows.
With Assembled, Thrasio has optimized its support operations to better meet customers when and where they are while also investing in the success of the support agents on the front lines of its brand.
