Best and Fastest Customer Service in Saudi Arabia: Zain’s Strategy

Interview with Abdulmajid Mohammed Alrashoudi, Chief Customer Care Officer at Zain

Firstly, can you tell us a bit about your responsibilities here at Zain?

I manage customer care in general. We deal with customers post-sales at Zain. When the customer needs to add/remove services or any troubleshooting, they call us through our call centre. The call centre agents handle these calls and try to resolve all the problems. We deal with enquiries about packages, benefits, add/remove services, billing disputes etc.

We also deal with compliance issues; we have to deduce whether we have the complete and accurate information from the customer that is compliant with the regulations in the Saudi market.

Zain is trying to reposition itself in the market. What kind of new initiatives are you going to launch?

To make sure we would stand out in the market, we based our strategy on customer care in two ways: firstly, we looked at how we can attend to our customer´s needs faster than our competitors can, and secondly, we looked at how we could improve the quality of services offered to our customers.

I can assure you that the fastest company in the market right now is Zain, because we are attending to almost 92% of customer calls within 20 seconds. We also help the customer and carry out troubleshooting for their issues within 36 hours.

Nobody else in the market is achieving these rates right now. If you include third party service providers (research and customers insights in depend firms), you will see that in terms of telecommunications companies in Saudi Arabia, we have been ahead of our competitors since 2012. This is due to many factors, such as agent quality and customer treatment, agent knowledge, and the number of complaints we receive on our network. What we promise, we deliver.

I can assure you that the fastest company in the market right now is Zain, because we are attending to almost 92% of customer calls within 20 seconds.

At the end of 2013, we began something very unique, I haven´t seen it done by any other operator in the region. We are trying to figure out if we can explore the customer issue before the customer even knows about it. When a customer calls someone locally or internationally and it fails, they do not know if the failure is due to their phone, the network they are using, or due to some other reason. We have put in a platform to manage these interactions to be able to know where the failure has come from, to then be able to call the customer and fix the issue for them, whether it be handset or line issues, etc.

What is the Saudi customer like? What are their expectations?

Mainly, Saudi customers want good treatment, as do people anywhere in the world, and they also want a clear tariff plan. They want their needs to be attended very quickly. We are now trying to reduce our 36 hour resolution timeframe to almost 24 hours. Any kind of operation has issues from time to time obviously, we try to minimise them and to fast-track the solutions.

In terms of the number of support staff per customer, what ratio do you have?

Best practice states that it should be 1:8000 (one employee for each 8000 customers, and overall we have 1:7200 (one employee for each 7200 customers).

Best practice states that it should be 1:8000 (one employee for each 8000 customers, and overall we have 1:7200 (one employee for each 7200 customers). The ratio is different in terms of VIP and non-VIP customers. VIP customers demand more and want their issues sorted faster. The VIP users must not be disconnected from their line because they are mostly business users.

Do you have a VIP service?

Yes, we have three segments: VIP, mid, and golden customers. These segments are based on tenure, spending with us, customer needs and the way the customer uses the service. We segmented the customers in order to deliver the services they look for in a timely manner.

What else do you use in terms of technology?

For the most part, Zain KSA uses the same technologies as other operators. Our focus is on the latest technology available from an aftersales point of view. We use Cisco, which is a well-known name for the call centre industry, and we use social medial applications. The plan is to have something called ´social care´ whereby we are going to create a community over the web so that customers can share knowledge with us and with each other. This kind of initiative is not that popular in Saudi and the region yet, but I believe that there are already many popular forums with these kind of communities talking about telecommunications and technology.

Are Saudi customer inclined to research on the internet or do they prefer to call or visit a branch?

It varies, some people want to use the internet and others don´t. However, if you look at the trends in social media, Saudi Arabia has the most users of Twitter and YouTube in the world. Therefore, we have a lot of interaction using these tools, for example, Zain KSA has reached one million hits on our YouTube channel. This is an indication of how Saudis are using the web. I also think that it will increase our credibility from a customer standpoint, because this is an extra experience.

What are the latest trends in the development of customer care at Zain?

We are trying to do something unique. In a couple of weeks, we are going to start a new initiative. We are going to ask our customers to reward our staff. We want them to give us their opinion on how much the call agent that answered their call should be rewarded. This is unique; I have not seen it anywhere else in the world. The customer will have the right to give an incentive on a monthly basis to our agents.

What do you expect from this?

Two things: firstly, the customer will feel that they have control over their treatment because they can reward the person who deals with them. Secondly, from the staff standpoint, they will treat their customers differently knowing that they can gain incentives at the end of the month. Even though we already have complete procedures to control these interactions, this can be one more attribute to control and improve our service.

What do you think makes Zain different from the other operators?

We ask ourselves what the customers are looking for. We compete on three main drivers: being friendly, speedy, and simple. We have to be friendly to our customers, we have to serve them in a timely manner, and it needs to be a simple service. Once you have these three elements in place, the customer will notice and speak about it.

Recently we began to use a NPS (Net Promoter Score), where we look at how much our customers are willing to promote our services to friends and family. This gives you an indicator of the reality about the brand. Then we asked ourselves what more can we do in this sense. On a transactional basis, we began to collect information; we asked our customers how they see us from a retail, network, and call centre point of view. We have recently just introduced the CES (Customer Effort Score), which looks at how much effort the customer has to put in to get our services. If we get results whereby most of our customers say that dealing with Zain is very easy, then loyalty will certainly increase, and they will promote this network to others.