UAE airlines leading the way in customer service says TICSI chief

Philip Forrest, who is responsible for The International Standard of Service Excellence, the world’s customer service benchmark, said the diversity of population and customer base holds out singular challenges for UAE producers.

“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 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 as the UAE airlines have.
“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 in line with the service sector’s increasingly competitive role.
The 2015 awards, organised by 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 until October 15th.