The challenge: Get a WFM tool up and running in hours while still accounting for their unique needs and workflows
Barcelona-based Typeform is in the business of turning digital interactions into lasting meaningful conversations, and it shows. Their delightful, people-friendly forms, surveys, and quizzes are used all the time and all over the world, which also means that their customer support team needs to be standing by and ready for anything.
No one knows this reality better than Pavlos Vasilakis, an experienced Workforce Manager who has fearlessly scaled massive teams and CX processes at Booking.com, Nestle, PepsiCo and Vodafone - all companies whose staffing was often at the whim of seasonality, volatile consumer trends, and changing spending behavior! In short, Pavlos is a WFM badass, and someone who was up for the challenge of building out the mission critical workforce at Typeform as they grew exponentially.
At its core, Typeform is agile, scrappy, and highly efficient. Like many small teams, they were laser-focused on fast response times and staying nimble, working together to cover as much ground as possible across chats and tickets. As the company continued its rapid growth, they saw an opportunity to implement structures that would help maintain both Typeform’s agility and culture, even at a much larger scale, while also making business-critical decisions and responding to forecasts based on the most thorough, accurate data available.
With that vision in mind, Pavlos was on it — and he had experienced this stage many times over. He started by building a performance framework for agents, setting up SLAs segmented by customer value, and building forecasts in spreadsheets. The next step was all about perfecting the fundamentals, including more effectively monitoring queues and SLAs and developing more accurate visibility and dynamic forecasts. This meant it was time for a WFM tool. (Fun fact: Pavlos had these plans in motion even before his first day at Typeform, having seen Typeform’s rapid growth and anticipated what they’d need to continue that impressive trajectory.)
Finding the perfect (modern) fit in a sea of old-school workforce management solutions
Pavlos was familiar with the upsides and the downsides of other legacy tools. In particular, he remembered the lengthy and complex setup required by each tool (from 6 months to a year!) as well as the time and resources required to keep the tools running. This was not going to work at a company as nimble as Typeform. They needed fast, intuitive, and flexible workforce management. Did someone say Assembled?
After meeting with other providers, I was excited to hear that I could get Assembled up and running in less than a week! With the other tools, I would need a full time team to get them up and running because they are so complicated, and full-time admins are needed just to manage them on a daily basis.”
Pavlos Vasilakis Workforce Manager
In comparing Assembled to other WFM options, the Typeform team saw a tool, and a company, that would keep pace with their growth, changing needs, and people-first approach. “I knew immediately that Assembled was the right solution for us,” says Pavlos. “Considering how fast Typeform was growing, I needed to make sure our WFM tool got us to value quickly.” Assembled answered the call, giving the team the “hands-down fastest implementation ever” (Pavlos’ words!) without anyone needing a PhD in WFM to get started and get moving.
I’m confident that even someone with minimal WFM experience could get Assembled up and running that quickly.”
Pavlos Vasilakis Workforce Manager
Another stand-out aspect of Assembled was its focus on agent empowerment, autonomy, and flexibility. Not only was this one of the key tenets of Typeform’s support team, it was also something clearly absent in legacy WFM tools. Says Pavlos: “The culture is all about enabling our people to have autonomy within their schedules. This freedom is critical for agents to feel empowered, and ultimately retain our team for the longer haul.” Features like self-scheduling, intra-day changes, and schedule coverage visibility (thanks to the Google Calendar integration) were examples of an underlying philosophy that Assembled and Typeform shared: agents should feel at their best, in the loop, and able to do their best work. And icing on the cake: rollout of Assembled to agents was seamless!
Assembled’s self-scheduling capabilities were a huge differentiator for us that other tools did not offer, as was the Google Calendar integration. Management can schedule meetings with our agents on Google Calendar, and effortlessly have these immediately appear in agents’ Assembled schedules with utmost accuracy. Everything is so self-explanatory that it didn’t require much effort at all. It took very little time to train the team.”
Pavlos Vasilakis Workforce Manager
The benefits of Assembled were immediately realized in a multitude of ways, from speedy implementation to engaged agents to new scheduling workflows and visibility. For Pavlos, the game changer was Assembled’s forecasting experience, which saved him time and gave him unprecedented accuracy.
In other WFM systems I used, the accuracy hovered around 80%. With Assembled, the forecast was so accurate that I didn’t need to spend time importing a daily forecast in the tool anymore. I trust what I see - at least 90% if not higher. And in terms of time saved, I spend 50% less time on the forecasting piece than I did previously.”
Pavlos Vasilakis Workforce Manager
And with Assembled’s robust yet flexible reporting capabilities, the Typeform team was able to establish a metrics-based foundation. Pavlos knew that Typeform had their own definitions of metrics, and was able to leverage Assembled’s API and data export capabilities to craft custom reports. With this new visibility, Pavlos and his team were able to clearly showcase team performance and gain a deeper understanding of the underlying drivers behind both wins and challenges.
Lightning fast implementation, top-notch and accurate forecasting, and empowered agents with an amazing self-scheduling flow? Looks like a true win-win for Typeform!
