Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Interactive Intelligence Offers Insight into the Middle East Customer Experience

November 12, 2013

As the nature of business changes, so too do customer attitudes and preferences. The contact center, which is the front-line of an organization’s communications with its customers, needs to stay highly aware of these changing preferences so it can better anticipate customer needs and ensure that strategies and technologies are in place to accommodate them.


It helps to pay attention to surveys of customer service attitudes, particularly when they are stratified by particular industries, customer demographics or regions. Unified IP business communications solutions provider Interactive Intelligence Group Inc. recently released the findings of its Middle East customer service experience survey. Following a global survey done during the early part of this year, the regional survey of 121 contact center professionals was conducted during June and July 2013.

Highlights from the survey’s findings included:

  • A large majority of respondents (78.5 percent) rated customer experience to be extremely important while 18.2 percent rated it important.
  • Respondents stated that the most valued accomplishments of a contact center are first-call resolution, professionalism and a timely response, in that order. These choices were the same in the global survey.
  • More than three quarters (76 percent) of the survey respondents already have a customer service strategy in place, though a surprising 24 percent stated that either did not have a strategy or were not aware of such strategies.
  • Telephone and e-mail remain the primary channels of choice, one third provide support for social media and one quarter for mobile apps.
  • Companies in the region are using combination of metrics to measure the success of their customer service campaigns. The most popular methods are customer feedback forms (57.9 percent) and customer satisfaction scores or CSAT (43 percent), while “voice of the customer (VoC)” programs and customer effort scores (CES) are employed to a lesser degree (each less than 15 percent).
  • Organizations are using a combination of technologies to support customer service, and these methods include customer relationship management (70.2 percent), customer feedback tools (52.9 percent), call and voice recording (35.5 percent), social media analytics/monitoring (34.7 percent) and computer telephony integration or CTI (33.9 percent).

“As a provider of business communications software for contact centers and enterprises, we were eager to understand the importance that enterprises in the region are placing on customer service and the strategies and methodologies that are currently being employed to optimize customer service interactions,” said Shaheen Haque, Territory Manager for the Middle East and Turkey at Interactive Intelligence. “The survey has thrown up some interesting results and it is encouraging to see a sizeable number of enterprises integrating the latest technology and social media into their strategy.”




Edited by Alisen Downey



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