Welcome Assembled: The Operating System for Modern Customer Support Teams

URL Copied

How do you prefer to communicate with the companies whose products and services you use? When something breaks, I like to text the vendor. When my wife has a question, she always picks up the phone. When my dad is interested in upgrading, he fires off an email.

To maintain customer love, companies must meet their customers where they want to meet. But when you add in live chat, video, and myriad other messaging services to the channels mentioned above, the complexity mounts quickly. And, if handled poorly, customer experience suffers. Delayed support response times when you’re already feeling frustrated leads to churn, angry social media posts, and serious hits to NPS.

There’s an underlying reason why these situations are getting worse despite the attention they get from execs: the tools built to manage resourcing of support teams, a category known as “workforce management”, were not built with these diverse channels in mind. Nor were they built with a mentality of empowering a support agent to have agency over their work. Modern companies increasingly view all of their customer facing teams as potential value creators, and they require a software stack that doesn’t treat them like faceless cogs in a machine.

Enter Assembled. Assembled was built to be the operating system for modern customer support teams. The platform empowers teams to deliver timely and effective customer support by putting the right person in the right place at the right time. Assembled connects to the various channel platforms to provide support teams a single pane of glass to forecast, schedule, and manage their operations. Modern teams like Looker, Harry’s, and Stripe have come to rely on Assembled as their core support orchestration layer; it’s become the backbone of their Support Ops teams.

I first met Assembled’s founders, Brian, Ryan and John in 2019 after our friend (and Assembled seed investor) Lan from Basis Set Ventures connected us. I was immediately struck by the deep empathy the team had for the problem they were focused on solving. Brian built many of the first customer-facing teams at Stripe. Ryan and John led some of the hairiest integration projects at Stripe. As the number of Stripe’s support channels and teams grew, Brian, Ryan and John teamed up to build out a platform to solve this problem internally. After seeing the internal success of the product, they spun out with the backing of Stripe’s venture fund to help other teams solve the same problem.

If you were to set about building a single pane of glass that integrates into a variety of complex communications and ticketing systems, you could not assemble (😉) a better team to do it. Stripe has grown some of the strongest integrations talent in the world. This DNA plus the empathy for the problem to be solved is a rare combo that gives Assembled outstanding founder/problem fit.

As we were getting to know the Assembled team (including their office dogs), we were also building conviction in the need for a modern orchestration layer to power the rising Support Ops function. We saw the need in our portfolio companies’ support teams. And we understand the relatively underserved nature of the support software space via our investments in companies like Guru and ASAPP that serve these teams. Functions like sales and engineering had complementary teams built to help them operate their core tasks effectively (sales ops and devops, respectively). We believe that Support Ops teams will similarly become standard in modern companies. And Assembled is the perfect team to help usher in that era.

They’ve become mission critical in the teams they serve, as evidenced by one of my favorite quotes from our diligence conversations: “if we stopped using Assembled, we’d be screwed the next day.” This customer passion was also evident in the renewal and expansion rates they’ve achieved, resulting in off the charts net dollar retention above 160%.

But perhaps the thing that got us most excited to partner was Brian, Ryan, and John’s focus on building an enduring company anchored on empathy for their customers and for each other. Having been a core part of building one iconic company already, they’re committed to building Assembled into a generational company they’d be proud to work at decades from now. We’re thrilled to be a part of that journey and to help Assembled win big in the long run.