Atea is the leading provider of IT infrastructure solutions in the Nordic and Baltic regions.

Its team of nearly 4,000 consultants work with businesses to help them design, implement and operate complex IT solutions using hardware and software from the world’s top technology vendors. The company also provides a range of IT support services, including onsite consultants and a 24/7 Service Desk.

Atea’s Service Desk is based across offices in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Latvia and Finland. This enables the company to provide fast, local support for its clients in both the Nordics and Baltics. However, with each country using a different contact centre solution to manage its customer support cases, delivering a consistent level of service across all markets and reporting global performance was a challenge.

Here’s how the company solved this problem with the help of Puzzel.

The consistency challenge

Atea’s Service Desk handles more than 1,300,000 customer support tickets a year. Prior to 2018, these tickets were handled in five different contact centre solutions depending on which country they arrived in.

This created several challenges for the company. Firstly, it was difficult to share data between teams and report on Atea’s overall service desk performance. “Getting a report on phone statistics was an issue. With five different solutions, came five different reports, which was hard to deliver in a unified way,” Rasmus Wåhlander, Group Service Owner at Atea, explained.

Each system also had different capabilities and product roadmaps. This made it difficult to provide the same level of service across all markets and to innovate and make service improvements on a company level. “On a few of our platforms, no improvements were being made to the solutions. We could receive calls, create reports & listen to call recordings and that was it. We didn’t have any other functionality than that,” Rasmus said.

Solving the problem

To solve these problems, Atea decided to switch to a single cloud-based contact centre solution that all service desk staff could use across the Nordics and Baltics. After considering a number of brands, it chose to partner with Puzzel because of its 99.99% uptime and fast service-level agreements (SLAs). “Those were the two most important things for us because as an organisation, we need to support our clients 24/7. Sometimes there could be an emergency at a hospital or a municipality where they really need to get in contact with us, and if we have downtime then that’s not good,” Rasmus explained.

Atea also wanted a solution that could grow with the business long-term. “We saw that Puzzel had a lot of projects and improvements planned for the future, so we could see the platform would be future-proof for us as well,” Rasmus added.

One company, one solution

Since implementing Puzzel, consistency has become one of Atea’s strengths. As Rasmus explained: “If a client comes to us and they have offices in Sweden, Norway, and Finland, we can now support them in the same way, with the same type of phone numbers, the same chat systems, layouts, and reports”.

Reporting has also become much easier on both a company and local level. “We can see statistics that we weren’t able to see before,” Rasmus said. “For example, in our Sweden office we noticed that we had a lot of calls that were longer than 30 minutes. And we realised that if we took all of those calls that were longer than 30 minutes and pushed them to be 30 minutes or shorter, we would be able to handle 1,000 more calls on the same amount of staff. We wouldn’t have been able to do that in our old system. We wouldn’t have even had the data capabilities. And if we did, then we would have spent a lot of development hours to do that.”

But Atea’s biggest achievement so far has been implementing a single live chat solution for its clients across all countries. Prior to using Puzzel, Atea used three different live chat solutions. But now, any one of its 1,000+ clients can initiate a chat from any country and be directed to the right queue and agent to solve their enquiry. The company is also planning to implement a chatbot to help triage and automate repetitive requests. “If customers want to chat with us, they will start with our chatbot. And if the chatbot is not able to answer the question, they will be handed over to a live agent,” Rasmus explained.

And the innovation won’t be stopping there. Atea has also automated it’s password reset process, which will streamline the process for customers and free agents to focus on more complex tasks. “That is one of the most reoccurring things that we have to handle on the service desk, so automation is our focus in the near future,” Rasmus said.

Smarter ways to work and grow

Consolidating all service desk operations into one cloud contact centre solution has not only solved Atea’s service consistency and reporting challenges. It has also opened up new opportunities for the company to grow and work smarter.

Previously, it was difficult to collect data and coordinate reports. Each office needed its own training, expertise and support. And the company’s ambitions to automate, innovate and improve their customer experience was contingent on five different solutions. Now, the company can react to customer trends faster and deliver more consistent, high-quality IT support.

“I definitely see Puzzel as one of our main partners moving forward,” Rasmus said.

Want to unify your contact centre teams? Book a demo of Puzzel today.