In his End of Year Message, Puzzel CEO Frederic Laziou reflects on how 2021 redefined customer engagement.
As 2021 draws to a close, I want to take this opportunity to thank our customers, employees, and partners for a remarkable year.
At Puzzel, our mission is to enable brands to deliver exceptional experiences for their clients by combining people and technology, and this year you did exactly that. It was incredibly inspiring watching you adapt and excel as customer demands changed at lightspeed. At every moment, you put your customers first and delivered exceptional customer experiences — automating when it made sense and bringing empathy when it really mattered.
Customer service goes digital
This time last year, coronavirus vaccines were only just starting to roll out across the world. Businesses were getting ready for a new ‘hybrid’ way of work. And almost every meeting started with “you’re on mute”.
Okay, so that hasn’t changed.
But in the contact centre and customer service world this year, there was a clear shift in focus from surviving to thriving. Having overcome the challenges of 2020, our customers were eager to invest in new digital channels and technologies to support their customers’ changing needs. They wanted to be able to serve their customers faster, with more empathy, and with greater personalisation. Agent wellbeing and experience also became a top priority, as well as enabling managers and resource planners to succeed in the hybrid world.
At Puzzel, we had the privilege of partnering with businesses to help them implement these changes and accelerate their digital transformation. And behind the scenes, we underwent some pretty big changes ourselves.
A year of growth
In 2021, we worked extremely hard to deliver new products and more value to our customers.
As a company, we:
- Launched a suite of new solutions and features to help businesses meet demand for smarter, more personalised and empathetic customer experiences. These included Digital Engagement, Video and Co-browsing, Quality Assurance, an improved Microsoft Teams integration, AI integrations, WFM tools, Text-to-Speech, Voice Bot, and a Real-time Reporting Dashboard.
- Acquired our long-time partner Vergic, integrating their AI-powered messaging and collaboration tools into our core offering to help businesses deliver smarter digital service.
- Expanded into the Netherlands, bringing a true, localised European CCaaS solution into the Dutch market.
- Formed new partnerships with technology and solution providers to expand our ecosystem and Marketplace, and offer more choice to customers.
- Created new business roles and processes to ensure customer success is at the heart of everything we do.
- Established a new UK head office in London to help us deliver even better customer service across the UK and Ireland.
But it wasn’t easy…
This year, many of us had to endure Covid-19 lockdowns, juggle work-from-home with home-schooling, and re-plan holidays.
More than 50 Puzzelers, including myself, also joined the company this year without being able to meet their colleagues face-to-face. For some, it was a six-month wait. So I’m incredibly proud of the professionalism and flexibility our Puzzelers showed, and want to thank them for spending every moment supporting our mission and focusing on our customers’ success.
So, what’s in store for 2022?
Experts can only guess how the pandemic might play out next year. But whatever happens, we know that our customers will rise to the challenge.
We also know that the speed of digital transformation in society and the demands from customers for immersive physical and digital experiences will only accelerate.
For Puzzel, our role is clear. We will continue developing our solutions and bringing new, innovative products to the market to help brands better serve their customers. And we’ll continue to expand our business into new geographies to strengthen our position as the number one CCaaS provider and partner in Europe.
(We might also remember to unmute…)