How UAE Companies Take Feedback, Keep Customers Happy

(MENAFN- Khaleej Times)

Companies in the UAE are using feedback from their customers in real time to offer better services. From winning back unhappy customers to getting senior leadership to answer customer service calls, brands are going the extra mile to ensure that their customer's experience is seamless.

Muhammad Masood Ali Khan, Director of Voice of Customer at Etisalat UAE, explained how the company's top executives answered customer calls to understand their experience better.“We had the top C-level executives take customers' calls live,” he said.“This was so that they could hear from customers what they went through and what they were feeling about our brand, so that they too know which areas need to be fixed.”

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He was speaking at a panel discussion at CX Evolve about how companies are moving the feedback they receive into the frontline. Organised by Khaleej Times, the event explored how customer experience (CX) is redesigning how companies and brands function.

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Company culture

One company leader shared that their company's focus on customer experience (CX) culture increased their Net Promoter Score (NPS) - the likelihood of their services being recommended by a customer to others - by a whooping 73 per cent.

According to Stephan Davies, General Manager of Customer Experience and Network Development at Al Masaood Group, the company focused on getting real time intelligence of how customers were responding to everyone in the organisation, including frontliners.“We're at record numbers at the moment in sales in double digits. All this just because we put real time intelligence into our business,” he said.

Another panelist, Sagarika N, Group Director of customer experience and service excellence at GMG, said that they formed a company culture of having a team huddle with their frontliners every day.“We focus on the voice of agents and have a 30-minute huddle with our on-floor staff to find out what went right or wrong the previous day,” she said.“Every time we get a good comment, we celebrate it like we have won the lottery.”

She added that all the real-time data that is collected in the company is shared with everyone in the company top down.“For every unhappy customer, we do a winback drive,” she said.“We cascade the data down to the team that is responsible for fixing it. It doesn't just stay with the CX team.”

Service recovery

According to Paul Mumo Ndaita, unit head of customer insights at the Commercial Bank of Dubai, it is important to notice early signs of dissatisfaction - especially in his industry.“Over the years, banks have made onboarding of the customer very easy, very frictionless,” he said.“We have been able to build a model for us to understand the potential of a particular customer going to a competitor during onboarding. Understanding the signals very early and having a service recovery is important.”

He added that with the country's 52 banks vying for attention from more than 11 million people in the UAE, it is important to stand out in terms of service and make sure customers are engaged appropriately.

Omnia Ahmed, Head of Customer Experience at AW Rostamani Group, said that in the future, companies will have to shift how they measure CX.“We need to use technology, but without disconnection from the human being,” she said.“We should also switch to predictive analysis. A lot of the AI and machine learning runs on transactional data, which will check how they interact with you and what kind of transaction they are doing. But imagine if we could do predictive analysis based on their behaviors before they purchase. That would be game-changer.”

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