Are you a customer experience leader in the GCC? Here’s how you can find out

In 2020, the main theme across all sectors – globally and regionally – is coping with the new normal brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. As businesses find ways to stay ahead in such a tough economy, what has emerged without doubt is that customer experience is key for survival and getting ahead.

But it’s not just the pandemic that has highlighted its importance; up to 96 per cent of the region’s IT decision-makers said that customer experience will be a top GCC business priority in 2020, according to a YouGov survey launched at Gitex last year.

While 80 per cent ranked customer experience as “very important,” and 16 per cent as “somewhat important”, the respondents said that the GCC’s customer experience push supports business goals including sales and revenue (42 per cent), bottom line (22 per cent), and traffic leads (14 per cent).

“GCC organisations that optimise customer experiences can design products based on customers’ needs, better predict demand and enhance procurement, and deliver products and services that can maximise customer happiness,” Gergi Abboud, senior vice president and general manager of SAP Middle East South, said at the time.

But not many are getting it right so far, say experts.

Writing for Gulf Business earlier this year, Shaker Zainal, head of Retail Banking Group at Commercial Bank International, opined: “Exceptional customer experience is a highly demanded, but rarely supplied feature in the UAE market, not just in banking, but across many other industries as well. So, we believe any bank that gets it right will differentiate itself from its competitors and enjoy “first mover” advantages.”

Meanwhile consultancy KPMG has also created a ‘six-pillar’ model to provide a precise definition of the kind of emotional outcome a successful customer experience needs to deliver. These include:

Personalisation: Using individualised attention to drive emotional connection

Integrity: Being trustworthy and engendering trust

Expectations: Managing, meeting and exceeding customer expectations

Time and Effort: Minimising customer effort and creating frictionless processes

Resolution: Turning a poor experience into a great one

Empathy: Achieving an understanding of the customer’s circumstances to drive a deep rapport

“In combination, they provide a powerful mechanism to help organisations understand how well their customer experience is delivered across channels, industries and company types. The leading organisations demonstrate mastery of these pillars and are outstanding at all of them,” says KPMG.

If you as a company believe that you have customer experience at the core of your operations and want to be acknowledged as a leader in the field, make sure to nominate yourself for the prestigious Gulf Customer Experience Awards 2021.

The awards follow an independent judging process and a transparent scoring system. Each category has a panel of three to six judges, with the scoring criteria endorsed by Cranfield University and the Customer Experience Professionals Association.

Every finalist also receives a feedback report with details of the scores and judges’ comments.

The nomination fee is Dhs2,199 for the first category and Dhs1,099 for each additional category.

The entry deadline for nominations is December 7, 2020, with the finalists set to announced on December 16. Presentations will be showcased virtually on February 15 and 16 and the awards ceremony will take place at Jumeirah Creekside Hotel in Dubai with an option to attend online.

For more information about the awards, click here: GCXA’ 21