By Jigsaw Business Solutions
“Would you just let me do it myself!” Sound familiar? It’s nothing new to suggest we all like to be self-sufficient these days – online shopping, online banking and self-service tills are commonplace and often preferred over face-to-face customer service. If it works, self-service can be quicker and gives customers a sense of autonomy (at least until you forgot to weigh your bag for life or need approval to buy wine).
Customers also like buying their own gift cards online, with online purchases of gift cards making up almost 40% of sales in the first half of 2022 (38.7% – GCVA H1 2022 UK Consumer Data Review Commentary). Whether you’re buying a physical or a digital product, it’s nice and convenient to do it from the comfort of your home, at a time that suits you. In the corporate gift card space, an increasing number of gift card orders are submitted and delivered in real-time over APIs (clever software that allows separate systems to talk to each other). Our operations team at Jigsaw now manually process far fewer orders thanks to our in-house platform Jigsaw360 and our collaboration with all major distribution partners in the UK and internationally.
In the true Jigsaw spirit of innovation and striving to make things quicker and easier, we want to give all of our corporate customers and partners a way of buying online when it suits them and without the inevitable delays that can come with invoicing – payment by bank transfer – waiting to see funds hit the bank account – and then issuing the cards!
We’re pleased to share that we will soon be launching Jigsaw360 – Partner Portal, which will enable our customers to place bulk gift card orders for our portfolio of global brands whenever they so choose, via credit on account or credit card payment.
There are so many other capabilities we want to offer our customers. Today, our clients are already using Jigsaw360 to support their customers. Costa for Business in Ireland are using Jigsaw360 to process their B2B orders and Costa customer services here in the UK are using it to replace expired gift cards. Our own e-commerce team use it to activate and top-up gift cards, generate purchase orders and invoices, and when they’re marked as paid – voila! The file of live digital gift cards and a secure password are sent to the customer.
If you’ve ever been involved in launching a new brand onto an employee benefit or reward and recognition platform, you’ll understand the pain points well. What artwork are we allowed to use and what are the terms and conditions of the gift card? Can they be spent online or in-store? Do they expire? We’d like to extend Jigsaw360 – Partner Portal to streamline this process, and make it easy for partners to offer our fantastic brands to their customers.
One important point to note. Online shopping and self-service portals are all well and good, but on the occasions that you do need help, having real people on hand is crucial. The friendly team at Jigsaw will continue to support our clients, customers and partners alike with a dedicated in-house resource. Find out more today.
