• Surfboard, a collaborative planning tool for support teams, raised $5 million from Speedinvest, Fly Ventures, Seedcamp, Tim Sadler and Edward Bishop of Tessian, Felix Jahn from McMakler, Alex Hersham from Zencargo, the Founders of Sennder, Stan Masseuras from Intercom, Nomad Capital, Foreword VC, Tokyo Black, and Jag Singh and other notable angels 
• Surfboard is currently focused on displacing spreadsheets and legacy software for scheduling. Within one week, Surfboard customers report an 80% reduction in the time spent on scheduling and significant improvement in service levels.
• With a mission to make work more human, Surfboard’s planning capabilities will allow support teams to make scheduling more flexible and better connect existing tooling 

Surfboard, the collaborative planning tool for support teams, has raised a $5m seed round, led by Speedinvest with participation from existing investors Fly Ventures and Seedcamp.

Surfboard was founded in 2021 to take companies off spreadsheets and archaic workforce management software.  Surfboard’s collaborative planning software connects disparate systems and data with the aim to make work more human by reducing burnout and increasing scheduling flexibility to match how people want to work.

The customer service industry has undeniably shifted to working remotely. With this shift comes previously unforeseen challenges like isolation, the loss of work-life balance, and workforce surveillance. In an industry wide haste to accommodate remote working, many companies fell into the trap of invasively tracking and monitoring their teams. At Surfboard, we are redefining how teams work together through increased transparency, fair scheduling, and collaborative team planning. 

Customer support teams manage their team’s time with cobbled-together systems comprising ticketing providers, time-off data from HR platforms, meetings from calendars, messaging from Slack or Teams and spreadsheets. Add in the complexities of remote working, multiple time zones and flexible work patterns and scheduling becomes one of the biggest pains for managers and the clearest cause of underperforming teams.

Surfboard simplifies this into a quick, seamless and adaptable process on an intuitive, easy to use platform. Within one week of using Surfboard, customers have seen an 80% reduction in the time spent on scheduling and significant improvement in service levels.

Surfboard’s customers include Bloom & Wild, Cuckoo Internet, Lick, Wolf & Badger, KatKin and Hypervolt. 

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein, CEO and founder of Surfboard, said: “Poorly managed scheduling kicks off a vicious cycle of long wait times, lost revenue, employee churn and increased costs. Support teams should always be treated as profit centres and it’s impossible to do that without orchestrating your team efficiently and fairly”. 

”I’ve seen first-hand the demoralising effect that the existing set of workforce management platforms, including spreadsheets, has on support teams at a human level. For support teams to thrive, individual team members should be empowered to work collaboratively alongside management and their teammates. That’s our vision for Surfboard.”

Surfboard integrates into ticketing, chat and telephony systems such as Aircall, Dixa, Intercom, Salesforce and Zendesk. It builds forecasts to work out how many people are required online and when they are needed. Its robust forecasting model balances availability, skills and fairness to build optimal support team schedules easily. Team members are able to collaborate to adjust schedules based on changes to demand or availability. In addition, Surfboard automatically pulls time-off information from HR systems such as Personio, Factorial, Bamboo, Hibob and Google Calendar.

Deepali Nangia, Partner at Speedinvest, who led the round said: “Across our portfolio we see many companies scaling customer support.  Support is even more complex now with the shift towards remote and even more critical now given the emphasis on customer retention.  We are excited to back a strong founder and team and are strong believers in Surfboard’s mission to ensure better collaboration and productivity across support teams.  

Reshma Sohoni, Managing Partner at Seedcamp, said: “We are impressed with Surfboard’s traction since we wrote their first cheque in early 2021. Their timely solution, relentless focus on their ‘surfers’’ well-being and customer satisfaction, as well as their long-term vision, will supercharge Customer Support and Success in a more collaborative and efficient way to the benefit of all parties involved. Natasha has lived through the problem and is well equipped to tackle it successfully.”

Collaborative scheduling means that agents, or surfers as we call them, can work with managers to manage the time together. Surfers and managers can collaborate to build schedules that suit their best ways of working and are flexible enough to accommodate their personal life outside of work. Teams are able to communicate directly within the platform to find the best outcomes that satisfy the needs and expectations of the customer while encouraging a healthier work/life balance for surfers.

The funding will be used to accelerate product development, helping Surfboard achieve their mission of connecting support teams in a simpler, fairer, and smarter way to make work more human. Surfboard will grow its team, deepen integrations and build more functionality to stay on course to be the single source of truth for all support team planning. 

Read more: https://teamsurfboard.com/

Read more about the state of shift planning in the UK: https://teamsurfboard.com/resources/the-state-of-shift-working-in-the-uk-2022/