Zain Jordan is by far the leading mobile communications provider in the Kingdom of Jordan. In a country with a population of 10 million people, the company serves more than 5 million subscribers through a combination of mobile voice, mobile data, and high-speed internet services.
With such a massive customer base, the company fields an enormous amount of support and sales inquiries. In recent years, Zain Jordan’s commercial support department routinely handled tens of thousands of interactions every month.
But as the COVID lockdowns went into effect—and quarantined populations felt a greater need than ever to stay in connected, the demand for the company’s integrated solutions (voice and data) increased, due to the applying the concept of “working from home”, in addition to distant learning (e-learning) and the booming e-gaming realm and internet-dependent entertainment.
This sudden skyrocket in customer inquiries—combined with the fact that Zain Jordan’s own commercial support agents were all sent home to shelter in place—could have negatively impacted the company’s ability to serve current customers and bring on new ones.
Fortunately, Zain Jordan had previously rolled out RingCentral Engage Digital, an omnichannel customer communication management solution. Because the company already had a customer support solution that unified all communication channels and made it easy for employees to work anywhere, agent productivity and performance improved during the lockdown period—and Zain Jordan was able to continue delivering world-class customer support.
The primary goal: Consolidate all digital channels in one solution
In addition to support and sales phone lines, Zain Jordan’s commercial support department offered digital channels for customers to contact the company, including online chat and social media. But the company had different platforms to manage each of these channels—and none communicated with the others.
Abdel-Majeed Al-Adwan, Commercial Support Director at Zain Jordan explains that this led to several problems. One strategic challenge with using disparate platforms, he points out, was a lack of visibility into customer behavior. “It was difficult to get a sense of the customer’s journey to the support team—to figure out if the same people were connecting with us through different channels, and if so, why.”
Another operational challenge, was that these platforms didn’t have strong reporting capabilities. “We had almost no visibility into our overall traffic based on time of day, day of the week, or time of year,” he says. “That made it difficult—and mostly guesswork—to forecast the right numbers of agents for each support shift.”
These challenges became even more serious as the pandemic lockdowns went into effect, and Zain Jordan’s customer care agents had to transition to remote work.
A unified customer platform helps the team increase its bandwidth
Fortunately, the team was ready for the lockdowns and the massive increase in customer interest that the shelter-in-place orders created in Zain Jordan’s products. That’s because they had rolled out RingCentral Engage Digital—an integrated customer engagement platform that unifies all digital support and sales interactions in one environment, which agents can access on any connected device.
“Traffic on all of our support channels more than tripled in 2020,” Abdel-Majeed says. “If we were still relying on our old customer engagement systems to manage all of those inquiries, with our agents all at home, we would have had real difficulty.”
One way the company was able to manage to handle this surge in support inquiries—while at the same time adjusting to working remotely for the first time—was by strategically using automation. For example, the commercial support team managed to redirect 34% of all customer support inquiries away from live agents to an AI-driven chatbot integrated with the RingCentral Engage Digital.
RingCentral Engage Digital helped the company’s team operate more effectively in several other ways as well. First, because the platform integrated all digital channels into one seamless environment, Zain Jordan was able to deploy agents on all channels at once, which they hadn’t done before because it would have required agents to monitor multiple platforms for customer inquiries. “That was a major operational improvement for us,” Abdel-Majeed notes.
Another significant improvement: Zain Jordan was able to add a new digital channel to offer even more customer choice. “Thanks to RingCentral, we were able to introduce a WhatsApp channel for customers who wanted to connect with us via mobile app messaging.”
In fact, the ability to send customers to digital channels like WhatsApp is helping Zain Jordan reduce the volume of more costly phone calls and redirect that traffic to more efficient and cost-effective digital channels.
“We’ve been adding messages on our support phone lines letting callers know they don’t need to wait to speak with an agent—they can reach us right away on chat, social media, or WhatsApp,” Abdel-Majeed Al-Adwan, Commercial Support Director explains. He adds: “We’ve learned most customers prefer to use these digital channels to reach us, rather than calling us on the phone.”
All of these operational improvements are helping Zain Jordan in a number of ways: enabling customer care agents to deliver outstanding service even from home, helping the company more efficiently staff their support and sales shifts to meet customer demand, and increasing overall productivity without adding costs.
“We managed to handle that 200% increase in sales and support traffic without compromising our response times or quality of service, and with minimum increase in our staff ,” Abdel-Majeed notes. “RingCentral Engage Digital made all the difference for us.”
Originally published Jul 29, 2021
