Etisalat is planning a major customer offensive drive with the official inauguration of its Dhs80 million Contact Centre. The Ajman-based, 480-position call centre will play a pivotal role as the UAE's PTT reaches out to its customer base. "In the future we are trying to be proactive," says Mohamed Bamakhrama, general manager of the Contact Centre.

"For the first time the Contact Centre will enable Etisalat to reach the customer and try and provide a service, or take a customer survey on the level of satisfaction of a particular service… We will go to the customer and try to utilise the data by targeting certain services [at the customer]," explains Bamakhrama.

The Contact Centre, which has been operating basic support functions for Etisalat's core business units for the last 10 months has already run a couple of small outbound marketing campaigns for Etisalat. However, with the completion of the PTT's data warehouse project the marketing offensive will be stepped up.

"Last month the data warehousing project was completed and so we will integrate with them for campaigning purposes. They will usually provide us with a data mart for the Contact Centre to access and use for a specific campaign," comments Bamakhrama. "We have already done two proactive campaigns since the outbound aspect of the system went live," he adds.

The Contact Centre has already begun to promote its call centre capabilities to corporates within the UAE. The centre is offering a range of services for businesses including transaction processing, technical support, information management, response campaigns, subscriber fault management, market research, telesales & marketing, broadcast announcement and support for online sales. Also the Contact Centre will offer full facility management to organisations that wish to bring in their own agents and use Etisalat's technology platform.

"Etisalat doesn't need 480 positions… We have made a lot of provisions here for other customers. [Instead] of companies investing in similar technology it makes more sense to outsource the business to us," says Bamakhrama.

Etisalat is also looking to turn its technical expertise, acquired during the four-year project, into a profit centre. In putting together the Contact Centre, the project team gained valuable experience in systems integration and development as it connected the Avaya call centre with multiple backend systems housed in Etisalat's separate business units.

"We have gained a lot of experience with this project over the last four years," says Bamakhrama. "We are also going to provide consulting services to [companies] that want to set up their own call centres," he adds.

The Contact Centre, which has effectively replaced the chain of smaller disparate call centres scattered throughout the emirates has also required a change of mindset, in the PTT approach to customer care. The single standardised call centre better positions Etisalat to up sell and cross sell over its product range via either the phone or the Internet.

"Historically, Etisalat always asked the customer to come to us… but now we're saying 'stay home and relax,' and do things over the Internet with E-Shop or the web-enabled contact centre," explains Bamakhrama. "We've had to change a lot of business rules to make [the centre] possible."

To deliver an enhanced level of customer care the Contact Centre has developed a universal graphical user interface (GUI). Behind the universal GUI lies extensive integration work around BEA's WebLogic middleware platform, which has been used to glue together the PTT's diverse database structure and provide the necessary information to the centre agents. The GUI has been internally developed by Etisalat's own team to "match" its own requirements. "Once the agent logs in, they look into a screen," says Bamakhrama. "Depending on the type of call, [the agent] selects certain programs that will enable them to find the relevant information. [For example,] E-vision has its own database and many other customers will have their own database. But the front-end will remain the same and we will present it to the agent in a particular fashion," says Bamakhrama.

The Contact Centre has also been closely integrated with Etisalat's recently launched online venture, E-Shop. When customers register with the site they have to phone and confirm with the call centre. Also visitors to E-Shop that need assistance online can hit a button on the site, which takes the user to a Contact Centre agent.

Although much of the project work has focused on developing both the technical infrastructure and building efficient business processes, there has also been extensive work to train the staff of the call centre.

Call centre agents are trained in customer handling techniques and then specialise in a particular Etisalat service. For example, agents that handle Emirates Internet & Multimedia (EIM) calls often have to dispense detailed technical information, even down to advice on PC configuration. "We divide the agents into groups and each group then specialises on a service," says Bamakhrama.

"We then do skills based routing from the Lucent PBX. [For example,] if a customer dials a Thurya number, the call will land on the desk of somebody that is trained in that service."

The technical team which has worked alongside local system integrator Al Yousuf Computers has also experienced a steep learning curve as it got to grips with call centre software from Avaya, CRM software from Quantus and computer telephony integration and interactive voice response systems.

"The technical team had the biggest share of training to do… there was training in the middleware, the PBX… some of it was done in the States, some in Europe and some in Bahrain. The training for the Cisco routers and the Sun machines [at the backend] was done in Dubai," says Bamakhrama.