Name: Smarter scheduling, stronger teams: automation and flexibility in action 🪄
Uploaded: 2025-03-26T18:01:09.730Z
Duration: 36 min 24 s
Description: Smarter scheduling, stronger teams: automation and flexibility in action 🪄

Transcript for "Smarter scheduling, stronger teams: automation and flexibility in action 🪄": Hello. Thank you everyone who's joined so far. My name is Jack. I'm gonna give everyone a few more minutes to trinkle in, but really excited, really excited to chat with you all and and show you what we're doing with scheduling. Maybe full transparency, we are using a new, platform to stream this. So it looks like Larry, welcome from Toronto. But, if you have any questions, you can drop them in the chat. So if you wanna test out the chat, let us know where else you're dialing in from. We'd love to see. Typically, I'm in the Bay Area. I'm based out of Oakland, but today, I'm in Las Vegas, Nevada for a couple of conferences. So, yeah, excited to see where everyone else is calling in from. Sweet. I will wait another few more minutes. But, again, thanks. It looks like I've got some Oh, cool. From Jersey, Salt Lake City. Awesome. Yeah. I see some friendly faces are here. Really excited to chat with you all as new faces. But maybe we can just go ahead and get started. This is being recorded, so we'll share the recording. If you wanna share this with anyone else on your team, by all means, feel free. Great. So, a little bit run of show today. We're gonna talk about scheduling. We're gonna talk about why scheduling is hard. Probably don't need to spend too much time there. I imagine you know why it's hard. That's why you joined this webinar. We're gonna talk about what we've already built, what we're building, new features that should launch soon. And, we're actually gonna do a live demo of those features. We're gonna show you what they look like in product today so that you are ready and keyed up to use that. And then we're gonna save a little time at the end for q and a. So I see people already in the chat. If you have any questions, you can drop them in the chat. Someone from the Assemble team can answer them, or we'll save them for the end. If you don't have any questions, we'll give you a little time back at the end. A little bit about me. My name is Jack. I've been with Assemble for a little over three years now. In that time, I've been very fortunate to work with support teams of all shape and size from maybe just a handful of agents working out of Zendesk, like, a little series a growing faster or something, to teams of a couple hundred, couple thousand internal vendor BTO teams. I I've seen a lot, and I've been very fortunate to chat with a lot of different folks from across the globe on their struggles with scheduling. So really honored you all. Wanna spend a little time with us today, to talk about scheduling. Cool. So I mentioned it earlier. Scheduling is broken. You know that. That's why you joined the webinar. It's just hard to do. Right? Building that perfect schedule, it's a jigsaw puzzle. You get your forecast. You get your sort of agent, maybe preferences or or schedule, you know, and you start piecing everything together. You have to look at skilling. Is this person on this team, are they able to handle these type of inquiries, or can they speak worth inquiries from this language? It's really difficult to do. And then once you've got your plan put together and you you polish it and put it up on a little pedestal or something, it instantly just gets confronted with reality. I often think of, like, the Mike Tyson quote. Everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face or the mouth or something. And it's like, great. You put together this perfect, beautiful schedule. But all of a sudden, Susie forgot to mention that, she's got PTO next week. You know, it's spring break or something, and the family's going skiing. Or, you know, people are still getting sick, and they are unable to show up today or, you you know, god forbid there's, like, an outage or something. I know OpenAI just had an API outage earlier this week, and and you've got an outage and you have to totally pivot your schedule. There's a ton of stuff that can come up to make it so that your perfect schedule, your plan that you put together needs to be adjusted. And as if scheduling wasn't hard enough, I've heard that a lot of other tools, it's like minor surgery to make those schedule changes. It's incredibly difficult to make the change, to communicate that out to your team, make sure that they know, hey. Tomorrow, you're coming in a little earlier or later or maybe in the next hour, fifteen minutes. You're not working chat. We're gonna have you on the phone channel or something. And then that just has detrimental downstream effects. Right? Like, hey. I thought I was supposed to be on chat. I didn't realize my schedule changed. Now I have a big adherence thing. Is that my fault as an agent? Because that wasn't communicated to me. So we have heard your concerns, and we are trying to make it easier for you all. AI powered scheduling, it's more than just a buzzword, but, we're doing a lot of stuff to really streamline scheduling activities. We'll talk about some of our forecasting today to build that initial schedule, some of how we're interpreting, like, compliance rules to make sure that if you have to extend someone's shift or adjust their launch or break, how are you gonna make sure that you're not maybe, like, breaking a local labor law or something? What AI automations we've implemented today and are coming to reduce a lot of the manual administrative work that you were maybe doing. What can we automate to make it easier for your agents so they're not waiting for you to get to that administrative work? And then we'll touch on some of the real time features that we haven't assembled today, we're enabling soon so that when you do have to be reactive, you're able to do it instantly. I'm gonna pause for just a second to see any questions so far. Cool. So a couple of new features in Assemble that we're gonna, go over today, and we're really excited to highlight, about just making scheduling easier. First one, top of the list, top left, shift swaps. I know that this has been a feature that a lot of customers have been asking for for some time, and, we have heard your request. We've heard your ask. It is coming. Also touch on schedule layers, a huge quality of life improvement, for teams that have been building schedules and assembled for some time now. We'll touch on automated PTO approvals, what that looks like on your side as an admin, but we'll also speak to how easy it is for agents to submit those and understand when or where they can take time off. Real time notifications, both for, SLA and schedule adherence, and then I mentioned it earlier, but we're gonna hit on compliance guardrails. These features are coming from feedback from, our users of assembled. We've got a public panty board. We love listening to what's working or maybe what's not and, implementing that feedback. So just wanna take a moment to thank everyone, for your continued use of Assembl'd and helping us improve the product, making it better so that we can make your lives easier. And with that, I'm gonna stop my share for just a second and actually pop into the product. Okay. This is the staffing timeline. For many of you, I think this will look very familiar. This is probably where you spend a lot of your time building schedules, implementing schedules, adjusting schedules. But for those of you that don't know, this is the landing page of Assembl. This is where when you log in, it's the first thing that you see. And just to frame it a little bit, what we're doing is essentially mapping supply and demand. So if I toggle here into new and reopen cases, I can see my forecast across all of my different channels and all of my volume rolled up. And then we'll compare it to the schedules that we've got in the tool here to let you know where I'm understaffed in red. Probably gonna miss SLA there or where I have a surplus of staffing in green here. So maybe a good time to offer VTO, upscaling, training sessions, you name it. But what's really great about this view is that if you are one of those large contact centers where you have broken out skilling by team or you may be leveraging a BPO, and you've got BPO agents, maybe two or three BPO sides, You've got tier two, tier three internal. You've got back office work. This is one spot where all of those inputs will coalesce, and it's really easy to drill down to maybe just the day. If I wanna see what my coverage looks like today, or if I wanted to look at maybe just my technical support volume and team, I can filter down in just a few clicks. The actual act of building schedules in assembled, really easy to do, and there are a couple of different ways where you could do it. Here, I've already got a schedule that's prepopulated. But just to show you a few features, if I needed to maybe adjust these, I can just click and drag and move those events. I can copy and paste, move events around, command z to undo. If maybe I'm getting flooded with phone calls and I need to move these people off of chat, I can just click in and change the event in a few clicks. You'll notice here, I've got this little carrot. If I open it up, now I've got my event layers. So I can see my actual productive time here is this phone event. This is what my agent, Eric, will be working on for the day. But if I need to adjust his lunch, I'm able to do that. Worth calling out, we've also got a stellar Google Calendar integration. So as I'm making these adjustments to Eric's schedule, they'll flow back to his Google Calendar. He'll see, you know, hey. My lunch is now an hour later, earlier. But we can also ingest events from Google Calendar. So if Eric has a mandatory all hands, a security training, a one on one with his team lead for coaching or something, and that event appears here and assembled. I'll just go ahead and drop a new one. As that moves in Google Calendar, it'll move here as well. Those are schedule layers. We're really excited to, launch those. I mentioned earlier, it's gonna be a huge quality of life improvement for a lot of our teams. When it comes to scheduling in assembled, I mentioned earlier, there's a couple ways you could do it. If you're building a schedule from scratch, it's easy to click and drag and drop in events, but probably not something you wanna do day in, day out. So we've got templates here where you're you can easily apply some standard template and say, hey. I wanna have this repeat for the month or something. And we'll touch on PTO. We touch on the Google Calendar integration. But if we are ingesting, you know, approved time off, if Eric is out next week, we're pulling in Google Calendar meetings, and I say, apply this template, keep these manually edited events. Those will persist and will only see, net new events from the template that get applied, and then I can really easily adjust as needed to smooth out this curve. I'd show you a few more things. I'm actually gonna pretend that I am team lead Carlos here. I'll filter down to just my people. I can see my schedule for the day. And maybe I got a ping, and we need to extend the actual work coverage for this afternoon. So I'll just go ahead and extend a few shifts, and you'll notice that these are getting highlighted there bright orange. Hey. Three rules are broken. So if I wanna click into this, I can see what's happening for Daniel, Larry, and Vicky here. Maximum consecutive working hours, it's only ten hours. So this is throwing a fit. Maybe I wanna go ahead and say, you know what? I need the labor force. I'm gonna go ahead and approve this, but it's gonna result in some overtime or something. Or I'll click in here, and I'll shorten the lunch to just a little fifteen minute lunch. And you can see, hey. We've also broken the lunch rule. Lunch has to be at least thirty minutes per shift. These rules, you can program them. You can customize them. I'll show you what they look like in a minute, but it's gonna be really easy for you all as you're making adjustments on the fly to understand what's happening to your schedule and how that's gonna affect some of the policies that have been set by your org. Show you what they look like. I'll come in here. Scheduling rules, and you're able to set them up really easily. We talked about that lunch rule and the maximum working hours. There are a ton of different rules that you could layer in, maybe between the start and the end of a shift. I want eight hours. Right? Maybe probably ten. You want time for your people to commute and and get a full eight hours of sleep, but you're able to say, hey. Let's make sure you start an end time. Rolls around. Internal events like the lunch, maximum duration, minimum duration, maybe. You don't wanna bring someone on for just thirty minutes, but you can customize these as needed. Click back into the staffing timeline here, and maybe, you know, I'm a team lead and I get a ping on Slack and our SLA is just taking a huge hit. We do have automated Slack notifications. So here, I've clicked into our real time overview, and I can see that for chat, our average first response time, it's approaching an hour and a half. That is just no good. If I wanna click down, I can filter and see who's scheduled for chat right now and see what they're doing. So, automatically, I can see Eric and Corey are out of adherence. Corey, it looks like, we can just click in, and they report to Oscar. So maybe I just wanna copy this view, and I'll Slack it over to Oscar and say, hey. Can you check on Corey or maybe Eric here? I can see it's just a no show today. Did we know that? Did Eric let us know he was sick, or is he just totally uncalled absence? I can see George is his team lead, so let's go ahead and copy this view over and say, George, can you check on Eric and see what's going on? Is this on us? Do we just need to update the schedule or something, or is he actually absent? Notifications are really easy to configure. You just go ahead and come in here and say, hey. Anytime someone is out of adherence for maybe more than 10 agents or ten minutes or thirty minutes, we're gonna go ahead and have that soft orange or bright red trigger, and then we can likewise do a Slack notification for these or for any of your SLA metrics. So, again, maybe I find out that, hey. My chat is totally getting dinged today, and I wanna filter down to people who are on email events. All of my events in it assembled, by the way, are customizable. I'm using emojis here, but you can have blended events, phone, email. I have one customer. I don't know what it is, but they've got a cowboy time event. You can do whatever you want. But I'm gonna take all of these email events today. I'm gonna say, hey. We need all hands on deck for phones. So I can just click in and in a few clicks, adjust all of the events. So now everyone who's online, who's available, we're gonna go ahead and say, hey. Maybe we let an automation or something handle some of those emails. We're gonna flow with phone calls. Can you go ahead and hop on the phones? Again, any adjustment I make here will flow automatically to their Google Calendar. If you're using, like, our Zendesk or Service Cloud app, you'll see the schedule change there as well. Oh, no. It looks like the screen share is stuck in the overtime view. Okay. Let me stop my share. We'll go ahead and try that again. K. Is this better? Cool. Sorry about that. Thanks for letting me know. I'll just go ahead and command z to undo it, but the example was maybe I see in that overtime view that I'm getting flooded with, flooded with phone calls. And here, I've toggled in. I can see that everyone is I've got a number of people who are working on email. So in just a few clicks, I can go ahead and say, hey. I wanna take all of these email events and update them to a phone event. That change, as I make it on the fly, will get communicated out, to your team, via Google Calendar or the Salesforce Zendesk app. I think, what also may have gotten lost, if I click into analysis here, I can see my agents who might be out of adherence and make adjustments as needed. So maybe John has been out of adherence for forty minutes. If I click in, I can see that John's team lead is Kevin. I can copy this view and send it to Kevin over Slack, ask him to check-in on John and see what's going on. Really easy to have a dynamic fluid contact center where you can see what's happening in real time and then adjust and react accordingly. I'm gonna pause for a second since the screen share got stuck. And I just wanna see, is there anything else that I may have missed? Go ahead and answer in the chat, if if something got lost, and I'll be sure to cover it again. But sorry about that. Cool. I wanna spend a little bit of time talking about two new features then that, I am particularly excited about because of the feedback that we have heard from you all. I'll come back in here, and I'm gonna click into time off request. With assembled, we have invested a ton in making it not just easy for you all as schedulers, as workforce managers to build out these schedules, use the tool, but also on your actual agents. We know that employee experience is more important than ever. We know that you wanna build schedules that work for your team, but also stuff might come up. And so we've invested a ton in making it easy for them to, from their work computers, submit a schedule change request, a shift swap or something, some time off, or if they wanna do it just from their phone, they can do that as well. Here, I've got an event. Ash Ketchum. I don't know if anyone is a Pokemon fan, but Ash Ketchum, they've gone ahead and said, hey. I'm gonna be on PTO in April. I can come in and approve this. No problem. They'll flow back to Ash. He'll get an email. It's done, and they'll update the staffing timeline accordingly. So now during this week, Ash will be on vacation. We also have integrations with different HRIS tools like Workday, where if you're handling this all in Workday, it'll automatically flow into assembled. I did this manually, but you can also set up auto approvals. So here, I can see Andrew submitted some vacation. And because it was so far in advance, we went ahead and just auto approved this. Much like the compliance rules we talked about earlier, these are configurable. They're totally up to you. If you wanna do it by team or skill, if you wanna do it by event type or, you know, duration or time from submittal, totally up to you. I'll click over so you can see what time off rules could look like. Maybe I don't want more than four agents on the phone channel to have concurrent time off. Maybe there needs to be at least a seven day notice. Go nuts. These are pretty basic, but you can set up these automated approvals. And then your agent isn't sitting there waiting and going, hey. I've got that ski week with my family in April. Am I gonna be okay to book the hotel and stuff? Go ahead submit it, auto approve it. They'll know. You'll see it on the staffing timeline, and they can go up and book their trip and enjoy their time. The other feature that I'm really excited to talk about, shift swaps. This one has been a long time coming, but we've made it incredibly easy for agents to come in and say, Kayla here has requested swap her shift with Roger. Right now, we're waiting for Roger to accept the swap. But as soon as this has been accepted, it'll automatically flow through onto the staffing timeline. And if I wanna filter in and say, maybe this quarter, I can see other folks who have gone ahead and done it. So Brian and Douglas have swapped shifts a few times. I'll have a record of everything here and assembled. Just like submitting time off, we've made it really easy for the agents to do, in just a few clicks from their my schedule view. If I'm an agent, if I've got a schedule, it would be here. I can come in and request time off or a shift swap. Again, all the events are customizable. So if you've got jury duty, bereavement, doctor's appointment, different time off codes, you can map those and assemble as well. Maybe I've got a doctor's appointment next week on a Friday afternoon. Maybe that's a little, bit of a, curious time to have a doctor's appointment, but I'm gonna sneak off a little early on Friday or something. We'll go ahead and say, hey. This is just gonna be a half day. Send this to my manager for approval. Cool. Once that gets approved, I'll know it. Or if we're doing auto approvals, I'll have an email right away. That's everything that I had wanted to, highlight today. I'm gonna go ahead and stop my share, take a quick look at the chat, and, see what's going on. Awesome. Cool. Okay. With the last fifteen minutes, we'd love to do some q and a. So I see some questions now. Let me go ahead and take a quick read through these. Do we need to update TM schedules manually? TM, is that team managers? I'll give you a second to reply. Heather does assemble to integrate with UKG. This one, I may have to get back to you on. I know UKG has a couple of different products, with, like, time and attendance, and their consolidation. We've looked at a few, and I know we've got an API, integration that some folks have done, but it really depends on which UKG products you are using. And you mean agents? Do we need to update, schedules manually for agents? So yeah. Great question. That's up to you. Assemble, it's very configurable. And if you want us to lock it down so that maybe managers, workforce managers are only able to edit schedules, fine. If you wanna enable agents to submit what we call a schedule change request, they can do that as well. Or if you I don't know if it's quite anarchy, but if you just wanna enable your agents to edit their schedules willy nilly, you can do that. You're able to set up custom rules and permissions, to define, who can edit what. So, if you want to just flow through with approvals, no problem. Oh, I appreciate the formula one. I wish that was my idea. I wanted to Lord of the Rings characters, but people do seem to like it. Okay. So questions about shift swaps. I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen again and show you that, yes, we do have restrictions, that can be put in place. The way it works, and, Heather, to your question about swap board, there's not quite a swap board, but you'll set up rules by team and and skill inside. So you may say, like, hey. Only these types of events, only these, teams, like, if I'm on Roger's team, only intra team transfers can work. Or if I just wanna ignore everything, I can do that. And then when I actually submit a or go to create a shift swap, what will happen is as the agent, it'll first filter down according to these rules what shifts are available by, other agent? So if I'm here, Kayla, I'll say, hey. My Monday shift next week, I'm no longer able to work that. Let me go ahead and request a shift swap, and then it'll pull up a list of everyone who matches, the rules that I've already defined as a manager. And in this case, I picked Roger, but likely, you know, Kayla will Slack or ping Roger ahead of time and say, hey. Is it okay? Can I swap this shift with you? And then Roger can go ahead and approve or if he wasn't given a heads up, maybe reject it. So today, not a board where agents can go ahead and just pick shifts, but, you know, it's a new feature, so maybe something to come. Let's see. Kyle, can rules auto approvals to swap time off team skill site level? Yes. Yes. They can. So all of the rules actually, all of the filters in assembled, you're able to use those to define rules. So the filters that we have today, If I come back to the staffing timeline, I've got filters on channel. I can do it by site. I typically think of these as geos filters by queue. This is typically volume segment coming from your contact platform teams. An agent can belong one to many teams. We can and a lot of these, we can, do parent child as well or skills. So maybe it's languages or maybe it's, you know, tier one, tier two technical support. There is some overlap sometimes between queues and skills, but just know you don't have to use all of these filters. They are here and available for you, to mirror the complexity of your contact center as needed. All of them, you're able to create unique rules for a set of so if maybe Charles, their phone agents have a different set of rules and automations as opposed to their chat agents or email because they're different channels, you're able to do that. Yeah. Great question. Cool. Yeah. I know we've got about ten more minutes here. Happy to stay, linger, answer any more questions that you all may have, related to the new features, related to best practices about scheduling. But I wanna just thank everyone who joined and, appreciate you for taking a look at what we're building. Well, Tim, let's see. For the time off request for pull, is there a way to reverse a decision? Yeah. Great great question. So we do keep a schedule history log here. So I can come in and I can see anytime a change has been made, a time off request approved. If I need to revert anything, I can go ahead and do that, but we will keep a record of everything. Remove some of these filters here. We'll look at past approved ones, and easy to go ahead and see exactly what happened if I wanna do a full reversion or if I just wanna do, like, a partial or something, maybe just the morning. You'll be able to do that. Oh, approve one that was denied? Yes. You can do that. It's not uncommon for us to see that rule has been broken, like, the schedules, missing breaks. Put in PTO for an entire day. Yeah. So, Jack, rules are brand new. They should be GA pretty soon here. If not, feel free to send us a line, and we can make sure we get that enabled for your account. But once you set up those rules about, like, making sure that breaks are in a schedule, you will see those, and that's exactly the type of issue that it was meant to solve for. Also, Jack, great name. Jack White. Love him. Love the wide straps. Cool. Well, thank you, everyone. Again, feel free to shoot us a note if you have any questions. My name is Jack Iles. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can send me a a Slack connect. Happy to spend more time chatting about any of this, assemble what what I'm seeing, in support and CX generally, again, at at a couple of conferences today and just really love to have these conversations. So happy to keep chatting. But thanks for attending, and, appreciate you all.