In focus: Raya Contact Center

Q: Can you tell us a bit about your company and the solutions that you provide?

Ahmed: RAYA provides next-generation customer support on behalf of clients across verticals. Our end-to-end customer experience journey is supported by the latest technology and the most skilled and passionate people. RAYA has been the most preferred partner of customer service, technical support, and global services for fortune 1000 companies across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa since 2001.

Q: In terms of customer service, what is the brand philosophy of RAYA Contact Center?

Ahmed: Our philosophy is all about creating brand loyalty for both our clients externally and our employees internally. Our services need to be unique solutions in solving major challenges that our clients are facing. In the meantime, driving high employee satisfaction, naturally, extends and spreads to every handled transaction with a customer.

In brief, the outcome would have to be an unfailing brand loyalty that we build for our clients.

Q: What do you think sets you apart from your competitors in the BPO industry?

Ahmed: We are always keen on redefining our value wedge vs. the competition. Best qualified people, most competitive labor markets, cutting edge technology are all within our competitive advantage as many others of our competitors. However, what really stands out and makes us who we are, is our domain expertise that we offer to each of our clients.

Q: How do you ensure 24/7 availability of your teams and how many languages do you offer?

Ahmed: The types of premium brands we have as clients are the ones who are keen on creating an unfailing customer experience with every touch point throughout every transaction they have with their customers. RAYA is their support resilient rock of service, yet with utmost flexibility. We provide services around the clock from our 9 different locations in 25 languages. The same level of accommodation expands to the workforce management adjustability according to their unforeseen demand.

Q: What metrics are most essential to ensure that customers are left with a memorable customer support experience, one they would talk about?

Ahmed: At RAYA we incorporate a full range of metrics that ensures that our customers are experiencing the highest level of quality from our services, these metrics include but are not limited to:

• Customer Critical accuracy (which is mainly the % of transactions which does not include any kind of critical error that might impact the satisfaction and/or dissatisfaction of the customers from total evaluated transactions
• Contact resolution: which focus on how to solve the customer query, issue, challenges by possible means and how to avoid its repetition in the future
• Of course customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction and not only from our contact, but from the whole journey they had experienced

By combining all these metrics and more, we get a full picture of what our customers are experiencing and regularly challenging ourselves to enhance it on ongoing basis.

Q: How often do you conduct trainings for your customer support agents and what are the key soft skills that you focus on?

Ahmed: Normally any support agent at RAYA, receives an average of 4 hours of trainings per month, of course this differs from one project to another depending on the complexity and frequency of updates/changes received.

These trainings are mainly triggered from the outputs generated from the quality monitoring processes, either conducted by us or by our clients, and/or our customers feedbacks extracted from satisfaction surveys, we identify the most common areas of focus and build the monthly training plans for our support agents accordingly

Q: How do you keep a check on the quality of customer support being provided by your teams?

Ahmed: Quality of support provided by our teams are controlled by different angles:

• Overall program level quality monitoring, which is mainly conducted by an independent quality monitoring team with a statistical valid sample size with the objective of measuring the overall quality performance on the project level and identifying any areas of improvements needed to enhance the customer experience.
• Agent level quality monitoring, which focus on specific agents quality performance, and it is conducted by both the quality team and the operations team leaders to capture each individual agent performance and their areas of improvements.

Q: How has COVID-19 impacted your business and in your opinion, how do you see this pandemic changing the BPO industry?

Ahmed: When COVID-19 hit, we had to rapidly adapt to this new norm and make sure we are satisfying 2 urgent business needs to conquer that unwelcomed change. First was to secure the safety and protecting the health of our employees, and the second was to ensure the stabilization of operations. One other objective that we had to rally the entire organization around, was to institute new guidelines of WFH delivery model for programs that were already operating 100% on site.

On the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic acted as a catalyst showing clearly how flexible RAYA, as an outsourcing partner have been with its clients when conditions change fast and how far along we had to quickly venture into digital services.

Q: What platforms do you use to gather feedback from your customers and what steps are taken to implement that feedback?

Ahmed: In RAYA, we believe that our Business Partners can transform every aspect of our company for the better, and this could only be achieved by listening and engaging with them as an integral part of their business. Therefore we use many platforms for that purpose such as:

• Periodic Customer Satisfaction survey, that’s adequate and thorough.
• Daily Operational Meetings on the operational level
• MBR, Monthly Business Reviews, to ensure the effective execution of the strategic and operating plan. Each month, we want to step back from day-to-day activities to assess how well are we executing on our plan
• QSBR, Quarterly Strategic Business Reviews are one of the best tools we use when it comes to keeping our clients updated on all the work that we’re taking care of for them, for a closer, more fruitful partnerships!

Q: How are you using technology to further enhance the customer experience?

Ahmed: Thanks to our digital suite of services, a business can easily satisfy and retain its customer base and improve the efficiency of the business. The key to providing the best possible customer experience is not only understanding the behavior of your customers, but through deep analysis of their behavior we can draw major findings, but also be able to predict future behavior and accommodate it to offer an exquisite customer experience. Add to this, our self-service deployment that makes navigating a call, to get what you ask for, much easier, faster and more accurate. Today, we are also able to support our clients’ customers who use different channels like social media, web chat, WhatsApp, beside traditional phones. The Omni-channel deployment provides better customer experience, builds stronger customer relationships and, ultimately, boosts brand loyalty.

About Ahmed Refky

Ahmed Refky is a Senior Executive, providing strategic vision and enterprise transformation leadership. Ahmed was the Managing Partner and co-founder of many companies in the United States such as Planovate and Nutri Selections. He also has served as the Senior VP and a founding member of Xceed, a global BPO service provider before joining Convergys Egypt as Country Manager. Aside from his professional career, Ahmed has continuing education in several institutes including the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is mostly known for his revenue and profitability growth abilities, as well as his versatility in starting up and turning around businesses in different industries.