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Puzzel

EvaluAgent and Puzzel form strategic alliance to strengthen growth and support shared product visions

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Puzzel, the leading European provider of cloud contact centre solutions, has announced the signing of a new strategic alliance with EvaluAgent, a leading Quality Assurance and Performance Management platform.

As a result of the alliance, EvaluAgent’s technology will be integrated into the Puzzel’s Cloud based Customer Service Platform, designed to directly address some of the biggest workforce engagement and optimisation challenges contact centres face as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

WEBINAR: Employee engagement in a remote-work world

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By Puzzel

In this new world of hybrid working, contact centre leaders face a difficult challenge. How can you keep teams happy, connected and engaged, regardless of where they’re logging in?

Join Puzzel’s webinar with guest speaker, Sandra Thompson for top tips on maintaining a strong company culture, keeping teams aligned, and supporting agents’ wellbeing. Puzzel will also demonstrate how tools such as Workforce Management can help you manage resources moving forward.

Save your seat here: https://bit.ly/3fXWzHg

WEBINAR: Hyper-personalisation in financial services

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21.05.2021

12:00 – 13:00 BST / 13:00 – 14:00 CET

Click Here To Register

Technology is changing the way people manage their money. Fintechs are disrupting the market with innovative new services that have raised the bar for seamless digital banking, accounting and insurance. But incumbent firms are now keeping pace, undergoing ambitious digital transformations in a rapid bid to retain customers.

In this highly competitive market, customer service has become the key differentiator. Customers are choosing the firms that can put their needs front and centre, who understand what they want and can tailor their products and support to match.

In Puzzel’s upcoming webinar, discover how you can transform your customer service and deliver hyper-personalised support with the latest CCaaS technology. Quick to set-up and easy to deploy, a cloud contact centre solution can help you capture the right customer data and leverage AI to deliver standout service without placing any extra strain on your agents.

Click Here To Register

Get ready for Get Connected 2021!

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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Puzzel’s annual Get Connected conference will bring together some of the best minds from across the customer service and contact centre industries to help you plot your path to success in 2021 and look ahead to the future.

You’ll discover the latest trends influencing the sector, see how technology and AI has evolved to help you work smarter, and learn how you can support, motivate and retain your agents as you navigate the new normal of remote and agile working.

Tickets are free but spaces are limited, so reserve your spot today!

Register now: https://bit.ly/2XbvZS0

WEBINAR: Fast Track Your 2021 CX Service Strategy

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Extraordinary times demand original responses. To help you prepare for the next phase of customer service evolution and deliver outstanding CX throughout 2021, Puzzel and customer strategy expert, Martin Hill-Wilson have developed Being Ready, a handy planning framework for contact centre leaders.

Join Puzzel’s webinar tomorrow to learn more about the framework and receive your free e-book and templates.

When: Tomorrow, November 25 at 14:00 GMT

Where: Online

Secure your place now: https://bit.ly/33aBpzU

Puzzel ranks top 3 among Frost & Sullivan’s European CCaaS providers

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Puzzel has been ranked in the top 3 for European CCaaS providers for 2020 by Frost & Sullivan, highlighted for their innovative products, and the vigour with which they embrace new technology and megatrends.

Based on its analysis of 150 European CCaaS providers, the placement on the Radar confirms Puzzel as the challenger brand companies need to know when an original approach to customer experience is required to deliver business impact.

To find out more about the analysis and why Puzzel should be on your radar, download the full report.

Contact centre outsourcing – Time to take a closer look

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Matthew Sims, Director of 4T4 Consult, the first influencer to join Puzzel’s new partner programme, shares the top challenges when outsourcing and how to avoid ice-cream shops only selling vanilla…

The current Coronavirus crisis has shown the importance of contact centres at this difficult time. When many organisations are looking to outsourcers for additional resource, this is a good opportunity to reflect on the lessons learnt in the industry. By taking inspiration from the top challenges encountered when choosing a business process outsourcing partner there are advantages to be gained. 

8 Top challenges for contact centre outsourcing

  1. Over-promising and under-delivering – a tight and competitive market in the service sector is a haven for bullish promises from outsourcers desperate for growth.  However, suppliers should be responsible for building a solution that is both capable of passing customer board approval and is deliverable.
  2. Buy cheap, buy twice – historically, the outsourcing industry has applauded itself on being able to deliver the same or better service for a lower cost, by using price as a differentiator.  The temptation to ‘buy cheap’ is immense but at what cost to strategic success?
  3. You can’t have your cake and eat it – third-party involvement may create ‘utopian’ agreements for customers, but when those agreements become impossible to deliver, they frequently end in the court room through severely damaged relationships and reputations.
  4. Poor alignment between long-term brand needs, solutions and cost – pressures from regulators have led many organisations to make major business adjustments to compensate for pricing and consumer-led pressures. But what is the impact on consumers, businesses and their shareholders?
  5. There are no tech silver bullets, only hard work, very careful due diligence and planning – tech options have never been more exciting and have the ability to catapult the industry into a different sphere.  However, getting from legacy systems, processes and procedures to a new high-tech state is not easy to do well and can be extremely costly.  Done badly, the costs of change often outweigh the long-term benefits.
  6. Keeping in tune with cultural and brand alignment – when profit has been severely eroded through regulation, competition and skills deficiencies service often becomes a ‘nice-to-have’ rather than the ‘must-have’. Too much focus on rich tech investment and outsourcers risk becoming the equivalent of ice-cream shops only selling vanilla flavours!
  7. Data privacy, protection and crisis management – in fighting for business, brands have focussed on the power of marketing they can derive from using customer data.  This risky strategy can be expensive if data is compromised, as contravention of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) could result in a fine of €20 million or 4% of revenue whichever is the greater.
  8. Practices that fail to keep pace with, and become misaligned with customer service strategies – often, when a customer service method changes, the people responsible for delivering it don’t change.  While the boardroom may applaud the reinvention, their customers could be fighting to get what they bought.  Meanwhile, agents are forced to adopt practices that come from teams who sit in the second row including the training, quality and management functions.  This is dangerous practice.

Successful companies learn how to turn these challenges into powerful opportunities to boost agent performance and the customer experience.  Organisations should first consider how they select and deploy the latest technology such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).  Learn from brands that have already invested in them to identify any pitfalls and don’t rush in.  Adopt a measured approach that takes into account the customer journey and then use experts to deliver a carefully selected solution.

Next, always remember a partner is not just a supplier particularly when it comes to business process outsourcing and service delivery.  Organisations should choose their partner wisely, seeking to surround themselves with people and services they can rely on for quality, reliability and thought leadership.

Finally, offshoring is a great strategic opportunity, but not for short-term or tactical gain. Companies need to ensure that the partners, countries and solutions they select are fit for purpose for their customers tomorrow and not just for their profitability today.

To find out more, download the 4T4 and Puzzel white paper entitled “Contact Centre Outsourcing – Top 8 Challenges” at www.4t4consult.co.uk or www.puzzel.com.

Top 3 predictions for contact centres in 2020

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Rapid change in the contact industry may seem overwhelming but a great place to start 2020 is with people, partners and technology. That’s the message from Puzzel‘s Thomas Rødseth as we welcome in a new decade…

With so much happening in the contact centre world, the thought of planning ahead can be daunting and 2019 has been no ordinary year.  It’s been one of immense transformation, for example take Artificial Intelligence (AI). As the industry cuts through the jargon and dispels the myths, we are seeing more organisations embrace AI to serve customers and agents. 

Innovative Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools such as chat bots are carving out a great opportunity for contact centres to reduce live assistant responses, leading to huge savings in time and support costs.  With the power to boost agent and customer satisfaction in one go, automation is an agent’s best friend by dealing with routine customer enquiries round-the-clock to improve customer experience (CX) and strengthen brand loyalty. Leaving agents to handle more complex interactions.

This year also saw the launch of Puzzel’s new agent application to remove desktop clutter and to present agents with the right information, without switching screens or resorting to pop-ups.  This single view of customer conversations accelerates an agent’s ability to improve CX all in one place and improves employee engagement into the bargain.

Top 3 predictions for 2020

These are exciting times full of seismic shifts at every turn and for a clearer vision, here are our favourite predictions for 2020:

  1. Agent wellbeing will take centre stage – when Puzzel conducted its recent survey of 100 contact centreprofessionals, an overriding sentiment was that agents are key to delivering a high standard of customer experience.  Happy staff who feel valued are quite simply, better performers.  As a result, we believe that organisations will take greater and more proactive steps to improve agent wellbeing.  These will include clearer communication of expectations, goals and vision coupled with a concerted effort to involve agents in departmental decision-making.  Contact centre leaders will have an even more significant role to play.  They will need to be approachable but lead by example, encouraging collaborative knowledge sharing while making the time to understand the challenges that their agents face and helping out if necessary. 
  2. Smart companies will create collaborative partner eco-systems – cultural wellbeing will extend to the way organisations work with partners.  There will be a definite shift from volume to collaborative working.  Rather than recruit 100s of new channel partners, forward-thinking companies will truly engage with partners that complement their services.  It’s a practical approach that will give companies the freedom to generate new revenue streams in their own way while effectively protecting margins and ensuring their offering stands apart from the competition.  This new collaborative partner eco-system model will provide everything organisations need to build a contactcentre where employees, their customers and the business flourish.
  3. Technology for the hybrid workforce – contact centres are already seeking to blend the best that man and machine have to offer to drive operational efficiencies and customer engagement.  As the trend for combining agent intelligence with automation continues, the focus will be on building a hybrid workforce.  For example, the latest application of Chatbots maximises AI learning from the contact centre and other parts of the business, to provide agents with the real-time knowledge they need to resolve customer interactions.  This new breed of Virtual Personal Assistants or ‘bot buddies’ will give employees an opportunity to boost their performance and grow their careers. 

It’s time to plan for the year ahead. Why not use these 3 predictions as a sounding board to prepare for your best contact centre ever?

Is on-screen clutter getting in the way of good customer service?

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Contact centres are still wasting precious time on administration instead of servicing customers. Colin Hay, VP Sales at Puzzel UK, believes the answer is, quite literally, staring you in the face.  Here are 5 tips for improving the customer experience using the latest agent desktop applications… 

Automating business processes and providing a clearer view of what really matters certainly makes life easier in terms of delivering customer service. 

However, just as the advent of electronic communications failed to deliver on the promise of the paperless office, contact centres are still required to deal with online administration which is often a major barrier to delivering an exceptional customer experience (CX).  

In fact, recent research by Call Centre Helper in the UK has highlighted that contact centres waste over 40% of their time handling administrative tasks instead of servicing customers. Much of this time is spent by agents switching between screens and on post contact wrap-up, updating different enterprise systems. The same research showed that less than 10% of contact centres integrate their customer communication channels.  

It’s time to tidy-up the desktop. The first step towards revitalising the contact centre is to get rid of the clutter. The next step is to take a fresh look at the humble agent interface.  Amazingly, it is often over-looked and yet it offers the perfect de-cluttering solution when supported by the right technology. Recent advancements in agent applications mean they are becoming more easily accessible, crystal clear and simple to use. They also help agents to clean up their own messy screens to produce a single contextual view of customer interactions by bringing together all channels and systems into one place.  

Five-star service, five ways
The answer to five-star service is literally staring you in the face. Make the most of today’s agent applications to:

1.Welcome in a brand-new widget concept – new agent desktop applications remove on-screen clutter by supporting direct integration between enterprise systems and agent screens through widgets. Customisable and flexible, widgets allow every agent to be presented with the information and functionality most relevant to them in any given situation without switching screens or resorting to pop-ups.  
This provides a single view of customer conversations that increases agent confidence, empowering them to provide a highly personalised and satisfying customer experience at all times. Look for a vendor that offers a collection of ready-made widgets for faster set-up and effective in-house training.   

2.Easy switching between customer enquiries – the superior functionality of today’s agent applications means that each customer interaction is handled via a separate tab which is opened automatically. This provides easy switching between channels  and customer enquiries, whatever the channel while allowing agents to deal with multiple simultaneous interactions at any one time.

Agents can even customise their screens and highlight the functionality tabs they use most frequently such as queue overview, queue details and personal queues as well as identity and verification tabs for specific partners or customers.

3. Extend social media capabilities – modern agent interfaces enable contact  centres to become more flexible and responsive by providing a far greater choice of social media communications options for customers. For example, they link directly to the latest WhatsApp Messenger and consumer review website Trustpilot.com. They can also scale readily to add new channels rapidly as they appear on the social media networking scene.    

4.Integration with partner systems for vital information – new agent desktop applications connect effortlessly to selected third parties and knowledge -bases, vastly accelerating an agent’s ability to solve user or product queries from one single user interface.  Information on orders, stock availability and delivery times are instantly available. What is more, today’s agent screens support co-browsing to enable simultaneous viewing of products while dealing with a customer’s enquiry.

5.Future proofing for an omni-channel experience – look for a vendor with a forward thinking approach to product development. The best agent applications have been developed with the future in mind as customerexpectations demand a sophisticated, seamless service from contact centres. They should support a variety of customer communication channels, systems and advances in Softphone that enable companies to provide a complete customer experience that meets the requirements of today and tomorrow. 

Spring clean your agent application to re-energise the contact centre and revitalise your customer careprogramme.

For more information on the latest agent applications, visit www.puzzel.com. 

GUEST BLOG: What role will Chatbots play in 2020? 

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Interesting times are ahead as contact centres cut through the jargon, dispel the myths and embrace new AI technology to serve customers and agents.

Colin Hay at Puzzel takes a closer look at the top three uses for Chatbots… 

This time last year, Gartner predicted that Virtual Customer Assistants (VCAs) or Chatbots will dominate the contact centre industry by 2020. Already, more than half of organisations have invested in the technology for customer service.[i] 

However, despite all the hype and discussion about Chatbots and all things Artificial Intelligence (AI), there is still an element of confusion about their value and a reluctance to adopt this new technology more quickly.

These are interesting times with exciting possibilities on the horizon for Chatbots as organisations explore the options and the opportunities ahead. From accelerating response times for customers to plugging the gaps in agent skills and availability, Chatbots are here to stay but how are they best used?

Three Top Uses for Bots 

Here are three ways to use bots to enhance customer conversations and boost agent performance for improved service.

  1. Direct transactional contact with customers – these are good old-fashioned Chatbots as we know them and their function focuses primarily on the customer. Designed as an efficient and cost-effective addition to any organisation’s self-service offering, they integrate directly into the core contact centre solution to improve first contact with customers and save valuable live agent time. For contact centres which already have existing investments in Chatbots, ready-made connectors allow companies to “Bring their own Bot” and seamlessly link to their contact centre infrastructure.
  2. An all-important triage resource – in many ways, Chatbots are a Chat version of IVR by acting as a smart connector as they transfer customer conversations over to human agents. Chatbots bridge the digital and human worlds by ensuring live agents have all the information they need, at the time of hand-over, to deliver a complete and end-to-end satisfying customer interaction.
  3. Dedicated Virtual Personal Assistants for Agents – the latest application of Chatbots maximises AI learning from the contact centre and other parts of the business to provide agents with the real-time knowledge they need, along with suggested solutions, to solve customer queries. Media archives within the contact centre solution are a perfect place to create a living library of machine learning and historical records of previous Chat interactions. Transcribed voice conversations, full of unstructured data, are transformed into structured data that is easily searchable by text, thanks to the power of AI.A new breed of “bot buddies” will enable advisors to boost their performance at work and deliver exceptional customer experience. Agents can engage with them through speech or text communication while the virtual technology works hard behind the scenes, using inbuilt intelligence to respond to agent enquiries and support staff in real-time.

What role will Chatbots play in 2020?

Some might say that “the jury is still out” in terms of the real role that Chatbots will play in 2020 but one thing is sure they will be a part of customer service. According to Gartner, more than 50% of enterprises will spend more per annum on bots and chatbot creation, than on traditional mobile app development by 2021[ii]. It’s just a question of what part those bots will play in contact centres?

To find out more, Puzzel invites you to join an executive breakfast briefing with the UK Contact Centre Forum on 27th February 2019.

To register or to discover what role Chatbots will play in your contact centre in 2020, click here.

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