Increasing regional adoption of digital technologies is also driving the awareness of the importance of customer experience. This is bringing into mainstream, system integrators like IST who describe themselves to be customer experience technology specialists. “Over the last few years, between geo-political tensions in the region and economic conditions, organisations are focusing their IT investments in areas that will help them drive down costs. At the same time they are under pressure to embrace the wave of digitisation and offer customers a seamless, connected and pleasant customer experience,” remarks Sherif Fahmy, Marketing Manager at IST.
Amongst its solutions are cloud-based digital customer engagement, sentiment analysis, chat bots, and speech to text engines. For its solutions, IST primarily leverages technologies from Cisco and Genesys, as well as from vendors Backbase, Entersekt, NovelVox, Nuance, Teleopti and Verint. IST is focused on finance and banking, vertical market segments. “IST’s knowledge when it comes to customer experience within these sectors has been a key to its success. Customers of a bank and the customers of telecom operators are very different,” says Fahmy.
Solutions implemented by IST have an impact on the metrics used to measure customer engagement. These include net promoter score or NPS, agent staffing costs, web chat SLA, amongst others. “At IST we understand what customers of our clients require, and are able to provide solutions that positively impacts the metrics that matter most to our customers,” adds Fahmy. In a recent deployment with telecom service provider STC, IST has helped improve NPS by 17%, reduce agent staffing costs per transaction by 15%, and increase web chat SLA by 62%. IST recently deployed a workload management solution at telecom service provider Mobily, and as a result their SLA improved from 75% to 92%, customer satisfaction increased by 35%, and financial payback was completed in ten months.
IST’s homegrown presence is also its fundamental strength for providing customer experience technology solutions. Consumer behaviour in the region is different from that in other parts of the world and as a consequence of these behaviours, the customer experience strategies should also be different. As an example, UAE ranks among the top ten countries in the world for social media usage among people that have access to the Internet, and Saudi Arabia as a country has the highest YouTube usage per capita. Understanding these differences allows IST to provide insights to their customer on the right customer experience strategies for these markets.
Fahmy points out that regional enterprises are looking for system integrators that are innovative and can offer home-grown solutions to complement solutions from vendors. The relationship between an organisation and a system integrator like IST, is not just a one-off transaction, but rather a partnership that should last years and even decades. Regional enterprises are also looking for more than a box mover, they are looking for system integrators who can serve as consultants. IST also offers financial assistance programmes to prospective clients, including pay as you go licensing models or other financing schemes.
IST solution portfolio
OmniCloud
IST has launched OmniCloud powered by Genesys, which is a cloud-based digital customer engagement platform, that empowers organisations with pro-active connected social, web and email engagement. OmniCloud connects an organisation’s digital channels together in one agent desktop, with reporting engine, unified view of interactions and routing engine, to allow management of digital customer interactions.
Sentiment Analysis
The solution offers businesses an opportunity to listen in, on their customers’ conversations, in English and Arabic, across popular social media platforms. With an accuracy of over 75%, it can automatically evaluate whether customer comments are positive, negative or neutral. The solution can determine sales opportunities by flagging comments that contain questions. This actionable intelligence feature allows call centers to better manage and direct customer calls to appropriate agents based on the sentiment and topics those customers expressed on social media.
Chat Bots
Organisations within banking, telecom, other service intensive industries are resorting to chat tools as one of their forms of communication with customers. This shift is due to customer preference for chat in their day-to-day lives, as well as organisation’s drive to lower customer support costs. IST is investing and has built conversational chat bots that can be trained and customised for an organisation’s unique needs. IST’s bots can be trained to imitate and manage customer interactions in both English and Arabic, just like live agents with the added benefit of being always available.
Speech to Text
Enterprises in the region are looking to analyse customer data at every opportunity possible. The goal is to allow contact centers to transcribe calls, so that organisations can understand how their customers feel and regulate agent performance. Based on a strong statistical language model and natural language processing, the engine is able to transcribe calls with up to 75% accuracy and above in Arabic.
Vendor driven solution portfolio
- Contact Centers: Cisco Contact Center UCCE UCCX, Genesys Contact Center, IST OmniCloud powered by Genesys, Verint Enterprise Workflow Optimisation, Teleopti Workforce Management
- Digital Banking: Entersekt Mobile Transaction Security, Backbase Omnichannel CX Platform
- Speech: IST Nun Text to speech, Nuance Voice Biometrics
- eBranch: Cisco Interactive Experience, Cisco Connected Mobile Experience
- Back office: Genesys Workload Management, NovelVox’s Finesse Unified Agent Desktops
- Analytics: IST Sentiment Analysis
