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Ombudsman Services uses Puzzel’s cloud-based contact centre solution to support rapid business growth and homeworking

Two homeworking contact centre agents work on their laptops.

Ombudsman Services is a not for profit, private company limited by guarantee.

Since implementing Puzzel’s cloud-based contact centre solution, the flexibility and scalability of the system has supported Ombudsman Services during a period of expansion and has facilitated new flexible ways of working across the organisation including homeworking for its Investigation Officers.

In recent years, Ombudsman Services (Ombudsman) has expanded its traditional portfolio and today runs national, private sector ombudsman schemes which provide independent dispute resolution for the communications, energy, property, copyright licensing sectors, the Green Deal, the ABFA, Reallymoving.com and Which® Trusted Traders Scheme. Rapid business growth prompted the company to extend its use of Puzzel, which had replaced its original on-premise telephony system.

Darren Hay, Senior Planning & MI Manager, Business Support at Ombudsman Services commented, “Puzzel’s heritage as one of the first developers of hosted contact centres gave us the confidence to extend our investment in cloud-based telephony. From the outset, it was clear that the people there had the experience and technical know-how to help drive improvements in customer service. The advanced functionality of Puzzel helps create a high-performance contact centre environment. This enables us to manage service level agreements (SLAs) and prioritise call routing to guarantee our growing number of consumers, independent regulators and participating companies a fast response and quality service.”

Ombudsman’s busy contact centre is split into front-line and back-office teams that currently consists of 166 enquiry officers, 150 investigation officers and 29 case administrators who typically handle around 40,000 calls per month, lasting anywhere between 13 and 30 minutes. Puzzel’s advanced web-based administrative portal provides managers with a complete view of call queues and agent activity, enabling Ombudsman to distribute incoming calls across all available agents to cope with rising and fluctuating call volumes.

To maximise productivity and accommodate increased workloads, the company has introduced the option of homeworking. Puzzel’s solution provides a series of benefits that make flexible working possible. As a cloud-based solution, it is stable and secure and is completely technology and operator independent, which means agents simply log into the system from anywhere, at any time, using personal computers or mobile devices to make or receive calls. In addition, the Puzzel platform is highly scalable and easy to use, therefore new agents are up and running quickly and additional agents can be added on demand.

Recently, Ombudsman worked with Puzzel to revamp its automated Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to improve the customer experience. Next on the horizon is implementing skills-based routing, ensuring all calls are directed automatically to the agent with the right knowledge or experience, a move that will facilitate smoother, speedier case resolution.

Frederic Laziou, CEO of Puzzel, concluded: “Ombudsman helps to get complaints resolved as quickly as possible with the most appropriate outcome. Therefore, it is imperative for the organisation to have a robust, scalable and flexible communications infrastructure to support its important work. With a proven track record in the industry, we fully understand the complexities and challenges of fast-growing operations like Ombudsman. We look forward to finding innovative new ways to meet their dynamic business requirements today and into the future”.

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