The UAE’s highly diverse population leaves organisations facing unique customer service challenges but its buoyant aviation sector has proved they can be addressed, according to the President of The International Customer Service Institute.
Speaking prior to chairing the judging panel in this year’s ‘GCC Service Olympian Awards,’ Philip Forrest, the President of The International Customer Service Institute (TICSI) who is responsible for The International Standard of Service Excellence, the world’s only truly global customer service benchmark, says the customer experience in the GCC should always respect and support the region’s cultural diversity.
Forrest, who also chairs the European Business Awards’ judging panel, said in the UAE, customer experience management also needs to reflect and support the country’s wider aspirations.
“The UAE is a major trade and international tourist destination with its airports not only the busiest in the world but also carrying over 10 million passengers – a number that exceeds the population of the UAE of all nationalities and is around 20% of the total GCC population. In the public sector too many organisations are already at the leading edge in their sectors. So the challenge for Customer Experience Management in the UAE is how to deal respectfully, successfully and professionally with a widely diverse range of expectations,” explained Forrest, who is a founder Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.
Forrest said the way ahead for UAE customer service practitioners is to set its targets high and try to treat every customer as an individual and deliver the service in a way that they need.
“In the UAE organisations should aim to be, not just the best in the region but the best in the world, someone has to be and as its airlines have proven, there is no reason why it cannot be many organisations across the UAE. Being the global best means that the margin for customer disappointment is greatly reduced,” explained the author of ‘Sold On Service’ the first European book on service quality management.
And Forrest says that organizations with engaged employees have customers who have greater loyalty to their products and services. “It is an organization’s employees who influence the behaviour and attitudes of customers, and it is customers who drive an organization’s profitability through the purchase and use of its products and services. In the end, customers who are more satisfied with an organization’s products are less expensive to serve, use the product more, and, hence, are more profitable or cost effective customers,” he explained.
Forrest will be in the UAE later this year in his judging chair role for the prestigious Service Olympian Awards, the only independent honours which recognise GCC customer service leaders. This year’s awards have been revamped and expanded year in line with the service sector’s increasingly competitive role.
The 2015 awards, organised by award-winning Ethos Integrated Solutions, the region’s leading delivery solutions provider for organisations striving to achieve customer experience excellence, are free-to-enter for public and private sector organisations and open for applications from July 15th to October 15th.
The 18 honours to be awarded include: Best Customer Experience Strategy; Best Customer Experience Journey Maps; Best Customer Experience Employee Engagement; Best Employee Customer Experience Delivery; Best Customer Communications; Best Customer Engagement; Best Customer Loyalty; Best Customer Education; Best Employee Learning; Best Customer Experience Measurement; Best Complaint Management; Best Use of Measurement for Improvement; Best Service Innovation; Best Customer Experience SMART Applications; Best use of Social Media; Best use of Technology to benefit Customers; Leadership Commitment and Best Customer Experience Delivered.
And the 2015 award also feature a People’s Choice award with the public being invited to vote online for the company it believes delivers the best customer service. People voting in the People’s Choice category also go into a draw for a chance to win an iPad each month from now until November.
The 2015 Service Olympian Customer Experience Awards, the second in the series, will be presented in a gala ceremony at the prestigious Burj Al Arab hotel on December 8.