Are you looking for Assembled alternatives?  

While Assembled is a highly-rated workforce management tool, the software has a few setbacks. 

If you’re looking for a solution that guarantees smooth workforce management, Surfboard may just be the ideal choice as an Assembled alternative. Surfboard offers a range of powerful advanced features to enhance your experience.

Let’s look into a detailed comparison of Surfboard vs Assembled to help you find the perfect workforce management software for your business.

Surfboard vs Assembled– At a glance

As a team lead, you must ensure that your workforce management tool has the right features to benefit your team and the organisation. Put simply, Surfboard is easier to use for anyone on the team, offers more features for your team (agents / surfers) and is powered by more integrations.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the features of Assembled and Assembled alternative, Surfboard:

Bases of comparison	Surfboard	Assembled
Capabilities	Forecast integrated scheduling, shift planning,activity scheduling, timezone tools, draft and publish tools, and configurable coverage rules for efficient workforce planning management.	Assembled allows you to create forecasts for multichannel environments, schedules, and analytics for workforce management.
Integrations	Surfboard integrates into your entire tech stack, connecting your disparate systems into one unified data view. This goes beyond just your ticketing / telephony provider and includes time off systems (Bamboo HR, Personio, Charlie HR etc.), calendars (Google / Outlook calendar), and messaging (Slack) Integrated into Zendesk, Intercom, Twilio, Aircall, Salesforce, Dixa, Kustomer and Front. This means you aren’t locked into a specific provider and if you add or change your tools for any channel, Surfboard can still support you.	Assembled only integrates into select ticketing and telephony providers. It does not reflect time off from HRIS platforms or actual meeting data from Google Calendar.
Ease of use	Surfboard offers a user-friendly and intuitive interface for a seamless and effortless experience. Surfboard is built equally for managers and customer service agents (surfers), creating value for your entire team.	Assembled takes at least a month to implement, with some difficulty cited by team leads and limited agent facing features
Customer support	Surfboard provides consistent and active customer support. Customers get dedicated Slack channels and a customer success manager with monthly check-ins.	Assembled offers quarterly business reviews only to enterprise customers. Onboarding support is limited.
Rating	G2 Surfboard rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars.	G2 Assembled rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars.

About Surfboard

Surfboard simplifies scheduling and managing shifts with its intuitive and user-friendly interface and advanced features. It offers accurate forecasts for shift planning and scheduling, allowing you to send shift reminders and notifications to support surfers whenever schedule changes occur. 

Surfboard simplifies the scheduling process with the simplest workforce management on the market, features such as automating shifts, tasks, and rotations make running a team a breeze. 

It streamlines the process, enabling you to forecast incoming requests, make adjustments according to changes in demand, and align support levels with staff availability to meet SLAs and maintain high customer satisfaction through quick response times from meeting service level agreements.

Surfboard provides seamless integrations with your existing systems at no extra cost. It connects with tools such as HRIS, payroll & billing, CRM, ticketing, and time off. In short, Surfboard serves as the central hub of information for your support team.

With its integration with Slack, Surfboard keeps support teams connected throughout the day. It also sends reminders and notifications for schedule changes, allowing surfers to focus on assisting customers.

Key features

Automatically schedule service and non-service tasks to allocate sufficient time for administrative work, training, or development within your team.

Easily create rotations for specific shifts (e.g., weekends or late shifts) using Surfboard’s round-robin feature, ensuring an equal distribution among team members.

Surfboard’s activity plans feature allows you to set rules for each channel and task, scheduling your team’s time according to your priorities and specific needs.

Use intuitive shift planning to build shift plans and patterns based on your team’s needs and automatically assign shifts 8 weeks in advance. 

Leverage your historical ticket data to predict ticket inflow and accurately determine the required number of support surfers. 

Every shift is tagged with time zones and locations for a complete overview of all your shifts across different geographies. 

Surfboard syncs time offs into schedules, ensuring easy management of international teams.

Pros

• Surfboard’s support team actively considers feedback and implements quick fixes. 
• Stay informed and prepared throughout the day with activity coverage bars updated every 30 minutes. 
• Easiest scheduling on the market with configurable shift planning, activity plans, and seamless integrations
• Best system for geographically distributed teams with automated time zone management, the ability to connect to multiple HRIS systems and create custom plans for each team
• Works well for managers and agents
• Access draft shifts exclusively in the planner for secure editing and collaboration among team leads.

Case study

By using Surfboard, Butternut Box, a pet food subscription company saved over 5 hours per week on schedule after moving from Assembled. 

Surfboard’s key features, including intraday scheduling, forecasting, channel-based staffing calculations, shift planning, and time off integrations, have enabled Butternut Box to optimise its team’s productivity and meet service level targets.

You can read the full case study here. 

Customer reviews

Source

About Assembled

Assembled is built to modernize workforce management software for internal and outsourced teams. Working with customers across ecommerce, BPOs (business process outsourcing), financial services and SaaS, Assembled provides forecasting, performance monitoring and scheduling.  

Assembled offers a cloud-based support Ops platform that is intended to cater to the requirements of today’s modern support organisations. 

Assembled integrates into telephony and CRM systems to power forecasting and forecast-generated schedules. It uses these connections to power performance and adherence reporting. 

Key features

Streamline staffing for BPOs and assess escalation rates and first call response to hold teams accountable to service agreements.

Forecasting for omni channel environments 

Schedule templates to migrate off spreadsheets 

Vendor occupancy and adherence to see where your team is spending their time

Use open API and CSV exports to pull performance metrics in and out of tools like Looker and Tableau.

Why choose Surfboard over Assembled?

When it comes to choosing the right software for managing customer support and improving surfer performance, Surfboard emerges as an easier to use, more efficient and quicker evolving alternative between Surfboard vs Assembled. 

Despite being newer, Surfboard has all the major features Assembled offers and is shipping two to three new features per month, faster than any other provider in the market. 

Here are some of the reasons why Assembled competitor Surfboard is the better choice:

1. A better relationship with customers through enhanced  customer success: Surfboard stands out in terms of customer success by providing consistent and active assistance to its users. 

2. Better integrations such as an integration with Slack, ensuring seamless communication and collaboration among support teams throughout the day. This is in addition to all major ticketing, telephony, calendar, HRIS (time off) and messaging platforms.

3. Easy functioning: Surfboard offers an easy-to-use and intuitive interface, providing users with a seamless and effortless experience. The platform’s user-friendly interface allows for efficient scheduling and shift management. 

Additionally, it provides a clean overview of intraday activities or tasks that can be customised to what the team spends their time working on (inbound as well as project based tasks).

4. Advanced shift planning features: Assembled alternative, Surfboard offers advanced features that set it apart from Assembled. For example, 

• Round-robin scheduling ensures an equal distribution of specific shifts among team members, promoting fairness and balance within the workforce. 
• Draft and publish tools allow users to create and edit shifts securely, facilitating collaboration among team leads.

Book a demo today to know all about how Surboard can improve your workforce planning and management.

FAQs

How to choose workforce management software?

When choosing workforce management software, there are several factors to consider. 

• Assess your organisation’s specific needs and goals. 
• Identify the key features required, such as scheduling, forecasting, task management, and integration capabilities. 
• Consider scalability and the ability to accommodate future growth. 
• User-friendliness and ease of implementation should also be evaluated to ensure a smooth transition. 
• Pricing structures and the flexibility to align with your budget should be taken into account. 
• Reliable customer support to ensure seamless service. 

What are the benefits of workforce management software?

Workforce management software offers numerous benefits to organisations. Some are:

• Streamlines scheduling and reduces manual errors by automating the process.
• Optimises workforce allocation by matching employee skills and availability with specific shifts and tasks.
• Improves employee productivity and satisfaction by providing self-service features, allowing them to view and manage their schedules, request time off, and swap shifts.
• Enhances compliance with labour laws and regulations by accurately tracking employee hours and breaks.
• Enables real-time visibility into workforce data, allowing managers to make informed decisions regarding staffing levels and resource allocation.
• Reduces labour costs by optimising staffing levels and minimising overtime.

Why should one choose a Surfboard over Assembled?

Surfboard offers compelling reasons to choose it over Assembled. 

• Reliable customer support with active assistance and integration with Slack.
• Easy-to-use interface and intuitive dashboards.
• Transparent pricing structure.
• Advanced features like round-robin scheduling and draft and publish tools.
• Seamless integrations at no additional costs and accurate forecasting.

Why is the Surfboard the best alternative to Assembled?

Surfboard offers more affordable pricing and has advanced features. Here are few Surfboard features that make the software efficient and cost-effective.

• Surfboard prioritises a user-friendly experience, making it easy for support teams to navigate and use the scheduling software. 
• Surfboard seamlessly integrates with various existing systems such as HRIS, payroll, CRM, ticketing, and more. 
• Surfboard allows for the creation of shifts tailored to the unique needs of the team. Teams can easily build shifts from scratch, ensuring the right coverage across the service. 
• Surfboard integrates with the systems that team members already use day-to-day, such as Slack. This integration enables regular schedule notifications and easy access to schedules, improving communication and collaboration within the team.