The CEO of Puzzel Børge Astrup has been mulling over the outfit’s first year of operation and all the developments in the contact centre industry.
This time last year, Intelecom combined its contact centre, interactive mobile messaging and payments divisions to create a new organisation called Puzzel.
Astrup said that over the year the number of agents on the Puzzel platform was at an all-time high and the company now employs 150 people across six different countries. Some of that expansion was thanks to the transformation in the contact centre industry as a whole.
“Mobility, digitalisation and the need for speed have increased customer demand for fully integrated solutions that improve customer interactions. The number of communication channels and personal devices customers use is changing, but the requirement for fast and efficient response remains the same”, Astrup said.
Puzzel wanted to expand geographically to take advantage of international contact centres looking to manage their operations using one unified solution across multiple countries. At the same time, it sought to improve local support by adding new regional offices and expanding its channel network.
In September 2017, Puzzel appointed Petr Bocek as General Manager of Bulgarian operations and Director, Business Development Central and Eastern Europe. Bocek joined Puzzel from Telenor Bulgaria and was hired for his local knowledge. At the end of 2017 a new office was opened in Helsinki, Finland lead by Gunnar Aasen, Vice President Sales to complete support for Nordic customers across Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.
In June 2017, Puzzel announced one of its most significant business wins when If, the leading insurance company in the Nordic and Baltic countries serving 3.6 million customers, created what it claims is Europe’s most significant cloud-based contact centre with 3,400 agents.
Astrup said that in the last year, Artificial Intelligence (AI) arrived in contact centres. Virtual assistants, digital assistants and Bots are regular guests at the self-service party and could potentially change the landscape forever. Puzzel is actively helping organisations to deploy Bots in their contact centres.
Puzzel is focused on introducing new technology which was easy-to-use delivered high levels of stability and security and promises to provide exceptional, multi-channel customer experiences for assisted and automated interactions. This year, we went one step further by creating a dedicated Innovation Team devoted to delivering more of these shifts in technology to the market. Automated customer service will be a focus for this team in the coming months, he said.
In response to demand for electronic card payments and mobility, Puzzel met its year-one objective and introduced Puzzel Pay. Using this new mobile-enabled debt collection and instant payment method, organisations can expect to deliver a seamless, improved customer experience, reduce the number of customer enquiries and lower financial costs with less invoicing and fewer unpaid claims, Bocek said.
It’s all a bit puzzling.
