An Insight Into Customer Service Experience Strategies of Middle East Companies

After conducting a survey of 121 contact center professionals during June and July 2013, interactive intelligence group INC, a global provider of unified IP business communications software and services, has released findings of Middle East customer experience.

In order to understand where the Middle Eastern companies stand in terms of customer service, the survey by Interactive Intelligence Group revealed some interesting findings, and the highlights are as follows.

• 78.5% of respondents rated customer experience as extremely important.
• The most appreciated parameters in customer interaction were First Call Resolution, professionalism and a timely response.
• 76% of respondents have a customer service strategy, however, 24% either didn’t have a strategy or were unfamiliar with the mere idea of such a strategy.
• When providing great customer service, 66.1% considered contact centre as very important whereas 24% perceived it to be slightly important.
• 51.2% of the respondents said that contact centre majorly defined customer experience. Nevertheless, Sales and Marketing departments and IT are also incredibly influential.
• The use of metrics to measure success of customer service campaigns was the widely accepted practice. The most popular of these were found to be Customer Feedback Forms (57.9%) and Customer Satisfaction Score or CSAT (43%).
•  The technologies used to back customer service comprise of Customer Relationship Management (70.2%), customer feedback tools (52.9%), call and voice recording (35.5%), social media analytics/monitoring (34.7%) and computer telephony integration or CTI (33.9%).
• Apart from email and telephone, which are the most widely used channels for customer service, social media engagement is now being employed by more than one third of the businesses. Moreover, mobile applications are now being used by almost a quarter of organizations for customer service.
• 28.9% of the respondents have acquired complete integration across all customer touch-points, nevertheless, over half of them haven’t executed this much.
• With 38% of respondents expressing their belief that customers in the Middle East will be ready to pay for ‘reasonably priced support’, customer service could significantly add to the revenue stream. Moreover, 18.2% also agree that these charges are absolutely justifiable in the case of high level services.