Background
Capital City College Group (www.capitalccg.ac.uk) is London’s largest further education college group, providing exceptional education and training for 28,500 students each year, as well as business clients and other stakeholders. The Group comprises three of London’s biggest and most popular colleges – City and Islington College, Westminster Kingsway College and the College of Haringey, Enfield and North East London (CONEL) – as well as a bespoke training provider for employers and apprentices, Capital City College Training.
Capital City College Group was formed after the merger of City and Islington College with Westminster Kingsway College on 1st August 2016 followed by the addition of CONEL on 1st November 2017. It was in the summer of 2017 that the Group first deployed Puzzel CC Customer Service Platform to provide a faster, joined-up service across the organisation’s growing number of brands and customers. Today, the group’s award-winning contact centre typically handles around 8,000 inbound queries a month, increasing significantly during main enrolment months.
The solution
Capital City College Group’s core contact centre operation is small but agile thanks to the cloud capabilities, simplicity and scalability of the Puzzel solution. Easily accessible from anywhere, the integrated platform provides the contact centre team with instant visibility of all customer interactions for each brand and across a variety of channels including voice, email, Chat, SMS and social media. The contact centre uses Puzzel’s IVR functionality to develop and alternate voice menus. Voice is the still the biggest channel accounting for 74% of interactions.
Using a single application, agents have a clear overview of every queue so they can switch quickly and easily between various tasks depending on demand. At the same time, features such as ‘My Log’ give them a complete view of all interactions which is very useful for follow-up activities. Contact centre staff can schedule calls or reach out to missed calls or chats to maximise response rates, which is one of the team’s most important success metrics.
Capital City College Group is committed to building a robust Quality Assurance framework. The contact centre uses Puzzel’s advanced reporting capabilities to produce customised performance reports while agents can track their own performance against real-time response rates. What is more, the team utilises Puzzel to monitor its complete archive of agent and customer interactions to further improve individual and team performance while sharing customer service good-practice across the whole organisation.
The results
The adoption of Puzzel to support the Capital City College Group brands has brought significant benefits to the contact centre team and the student community they serve. One of the most impressive results is the dramatic improvement to call abandonment rates. During the first academic year of using Puzzel ie between August 2017 and July 2018, the number of abandoned calls fell by a staggering 68% compared to the previous year. With an instant view of all incoming interactions, contact centre resources can be easily re-deployed to respond to fluctuating demands. This guarantees students always receive consistent levels of fast, focused advice to help them make better, informed decisions on their choice of learning options.
During busy recruitment periods when contact volumes frequently double, the scalability of the Puzzel solution means Capital City College Group can simply add new agents swiftly and cost-effectively. At the same time, omni-channel capabilities support the growing popularity of Webchat, SMS and social media, the growing choice of communication for the group’s largest customer group, which is young people aged 16-18 years.
For agents, the beauty of the Puzzel system is that they can now handle voice and all channels from the same application, saving time and vastly improving the agent experience. Most recently, Capital City College Group has started to use Puzzel’s new, Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven, Agent Assist to present agents with suggested responses to customer queries based on historic and ongoing interactions. This coincides with a project to build a knowledgebase to empower agents with comprehensive content through closer collaboration with the curriculum teams. Enabling quick and easy access to relevant product knowledge directly from the Puzzel Customer Service Platform.
Matrix accreditation
The adoption of Puzzel to support the Capital City College Group brands has brought significant benefits to the contact centre team and the student community they serve. One of the most impressive results is the dramatic improvement to call abandonment rates. During the first academic year of using Puzzel ie between August 2017 and July 2018, the number of abandoned calls fell by a staggering 68% compared to the previous year. With an instant view of all incoming interactions, contact centre resources can be easily re-deployed to respond to fluctuating demands. This guarantees students always receive consistent levels of fast, focused advice to help them make better, informed decisions on their choice of learning options.
During busy recruitment periods when contact volumes frequently double, the scalability of the Puzzel solution means Capital City College Group can simply add new agents swiftly and cost-effectively. At the same time, omni-channel capabilities support the growing popularity of Webchat, SMS and social media, the growing choice of communication for the group’s largest customer group, which is young people aged 16-18 years.
For agents, the beauty of the Puzzel system is that they can now handle voice and all channels from the same application, saving time and vastly improving the agent experience. Most recently, Capital City College Group has started to use Puzzel’s new, Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven, Agent Assist to present agents with suggested responses to customer queries based on historic and ongoing interactions. This coincides with a project to build a knowledgebase to empower agents with comprehensive content through closer collaboration with the curriculum teams. Enabling quick and easy access to relevant product knowledge directly from the Puzzel Customer Service Platform.
