Insight: Striving to meet customer needs
(Ajman | By Sunil Rao | 23/08/2002)

Ajman-based Etisalat unit The Contact Centre has grown to become among the key nodal service points for the corporation, with traffic having grown to 4.2 million telephone calls per month, from 400,000 at its inception in December 2000.

Today, the facility offers a wide range of back-room services across the entire gamut of communications channels available, including telephony, facsimile messaging, and over the Internet, covering e-mails, text chats and web forms.

"The Contact Centre is a dedicated 24-hour outsourcing contact management facility," Mohammed Bamakhrama, General Manager, explained recently.

"Our goal is to provide an absolute value to meet or exceed our customer expectations and needs."

The complex has a diversified workforce of customer service representatives, supervisors, sales personnel, engineers and managers. The centre itself runs off the latest in technological platforms, incorporating the latest applications and industry practices in a bid to stay a market leader.
"We tailor our services to meet the aims and objectives for our clients," the official added.

"By utilising a range of bespoke services and skills we accommodate the needs of many different business sectors, adding value to our clients' customers and brands."

This ambitious project has as its corporate mission: "To become a world-class customer service centre for sales and support, with emphasis on service excellence and customer needs".

Bamakhrama said the centre in Ajman, seating 480, is manned round-the-clock by over 600 employees working on shifts, fielding all directory enquiry calls from Dubai, Sharjah and the Northern Emirates.

"We have another similar facility in Abu Dhabi to cater to callers from the capital and Al Ain," he added. "There is another site in Sharjah for contingency planning and disaster recovery, which serves primarily as back-up support. What this essentially means is the facility already has all the infrastructure and necessary technical back-up, and can be started up at the touch of a button."

Investment only in the technical equipment in the Ajman facility is around Dh36 million, while overall investment including the Abu Dhabi unit totals Dh45 million.

The Contact Centre has 750 employees between Ajman and Abu Dhabi, 70 per cent of them being locals and 46 per cent ladies.

As a normal part of its business activities, the centre offers a range of solutions into the market. The solutions range from live, inbound and outbound, customer interactions to fully automated solutions, from customer care to telesales, covering a wide range of non-face to face activities across all the communications media available.

A detailed look at the services on offer make for interesting reading.

E-vision Support (8005500 toll-free number): There are 25 agents working on two shifts. Timings are from 8am to 10pm except for Friday, when they work from 9am to 5pm.

If a customer calls outside these hours, he can leave a message in the automated answering machine, and one of the team contacts him the next day. Costumers can also send an e-mail message "call me back" with his contact details.

This unit receives an average 2,000 calls daily, with a maximum of 3,700 calls.

Agents on this toll free number give technical support, sign on new subscriptions and offer customers payment facilities by credit card, like renewing the subscription, adding additional services and charging existing customers.

Comtrust Support (8006100 toll-free number): There are 20 agents working on two shifts in this unit, receiving an average 100 calls per month, mostly of long duration since these are business oriented.

The agents get specific training on Comtrust products and can offer customers technical support.

EIM Emirates Internet and Multimedia support (8006100/8005244 toll-free numbers): There are 60 agents working on six shifts with an average of 17 agents per shift on a 24 x 7 basis. Costumers can also send e-mail messages for "call me back" with contact details, or even write down their problem on the e-mail, whereupon the agent gets back either by phone or e-mail.

This unit receives an average 2,000 calls daily, with a peak of 3,000. Call duration is generally lengthy due to the detailed instructions entailed and might reach 30 minutes. Peak times are 10am-2pm and 4pm-9pm.

EIM support agents are all experienced in MIS and 80 per cent of them are IT engineers. Before becoming official agents, they all have two months' training, of which they spend one week in the EIM offices and two to three weeks with a senior.

The agents get training on costumer satisfaction, web hosting, software operations, network operation and services. They can give comprehensive technical support for Internet usage and can actually help fix the costumers' complains while on the net by logging in the needed websites.

Thuraya/GPRS (8006633 toll-free number): Timings for this service are from 7am to 1pm and from 4pm to 11pm. The unit receives an average 500 calls daily.

The agents here help customers who wish to use the website: www.e4m4.co.ae , in viewing bills, making a complaint, paying Etisalat's bills, star services, changed postal address, etc.

International directory service (100 toll-free number): Timings are 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The unit receives an average 5,000 calls daily.

The agents here can give information on foreign countries such as the code number, time difference, and basic information about this country.

General Enquiry on Etisalat's services and Fault reporting (101/171 toll-free numbers): Timings are 24 x 7, with this section receiving an average 20,000 calls daily, climbing to a peak of 30,000 calls.

The centre claims all calls should be attended to and answered within 20 seconds.

Agents here can provide information on foreign countries such the code number, time difference, and basic information about this country.

The number 171 is dedicated for facsimile and fixed lines.

Directory Enquiry (181 for Arabic language, 180 for English): This is the service which experiences maximum demand, and is manned by 273 agents working on six shifts on a 24 x 7 basis. Costumers can also send an e-mail message for "call me back" with his contact details, or send a fax.

The section receives an average 100,000 calls daily, with the number of calls differing as per the day of the week: on Saturdays the average is 120,000 calls per day, on Thursdays 80,000, and on Fridays as low as 40,000.

The maximum record for this service reached 145,000 calls on June 1.

Agents here get two months of training, with special emphasis placed on providing costumer satisfaction.

The is the only service that is charged at present, at the rate of 30 fils for land line calls and 30 fils per minute for enquiries by cellphone. Bamakhrama said: "The charge is certainly not aimed at getting revenue - we spend far more than the 30 fils on fielding such enquiries.

"The idea is to reinvest what we get into The Contact Centre, in terms of constant upgradation and staff training, to offer better services and cut down response time. The charges will also serve to ensure the service is not misused."

The section has a division for quality monitoring of the costumer care provided, with grades being conferred on each agent. The total grades are divided into three main streams: 30 per cent for attendance, 20 per cent for quantity of calls served, and 50 per cent on quality.

New vistas

Etisalat, meanwhile, itself continues to proactively seek other opportunities for business expansion and growth through its subsidiaries and units, including The Contact Centre.

Bamakhrama said: "Firstly, we have just announced plans to offer Arabic speech recognition software as a joint venture, for the vast Middle East and North Africa region; and secondly, we are approaching major corporates operating in this region, offering them outsource services tailormade to their requirements."

He said the centre has already rolled out these services: "We already have a Dubai-based customer, and two other GCC corporates, all in the private sector."

The idea here is to offer a range of products and solutions for companies and state establishments in the entire Arab world - with the initial stress being on the UAE, and the GCC - through handling phone messages, e-mail and faxes as also to offer automated services.

"The potential here is considerable, and we expect to eventually derive 50 per cent of our revenues from this business stream."

This can be offered as either a long-term or short-term solution, in various permutations and combinations.

Others included disaster recovery for companies and clients with existing call centres, guaranteeing availability in case the client's own call centre breaks down for any reason; overflow call handling, particularly for after-hours services, and a host of managed facilities.