Situation

In 2004, Oman announced that it was opening up its telecoms market, previously restricted to the state operator, with the licensing of a second mobile telecommunications provider. After a tendering process between 28 international consortia, the new licence was awarded to Nawras, a joint venture between Qatar’s Qtel, Danish telecommunications company TDC and several prominent Omani partners. The management of Nawras knew that in order to attract customers to change from the existing mobile operator, the company would need to offer a superior service in all aspects of its offering.

As a new operator, the company would be able to roll out the latest and best in telecommunications technology to enable it to offer new and innovative mobile services, but it also wanted to offer the highest standards of customer care, to ensure that customer experience was good enough to convince customers to choose Nawras. As the operating licence was awarded the 21. June 2004, and the company launched its infrastructure project in September 2004, with an intended launch date for services of March 2005, Nawras needed a swift solution to its customer management requirements.

Solution

Since its inception, Nawras had been discussing with Microsoft and Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) as to how Microsoft technology could help them to improve their operations.

Peter Rubeck, chief technical officer at Nawras explained: “We worked very closely with the Microsoft EMEA telecoms team on setting up this solution, and from the very start of this engagement MCS showed a really in-depth understanding both of the telecoms industry, and of our requirements and how Microsoft solutions could help us reach our business goals. The level of support from Microsoft and from the technology partners that collaborated on this project, will allow us to really drive our services to the customers without having to worry about our infrastructure solutions.”

Benefits

By providing Nawras with a comprehensive set of solutions, Microsoft and its partners helped the company to concentrate on its core business of serving customers in the best possible way. Because the Microsoft solution is easily integrated with other technology, and thanks to the rapid speed to market, Nawras was able to begin operations and start earning revenue with a minimal amount of time spent on defining and implementing technology.

“As a new player in Oman’s mobile telecoms market, it is vital that we at Nawras can focus on winning and keeping new customers, without becoming bogged down in the details of creating our technology infrastructure. The Microsoft Contact Center Framework gives us everything we need for a comprehensive, integrated solution to manage our customers and help us to provide the highest standards of service to them,” Rubeck said.

“Every part of the customer experience, outside of the actual communications, from setting up an account and activating a new phone, through to Web Selfcare and our call center is managed by the CCF – it allows Nawras to get to market with our services in a very rapid and cost effective way. We implemented twenty different systems simultaneously, and we were able to roll them out in just five months, helping us go to market with our mobile services on schedule,” he added.

As a new entrant to an established market, Nawras relies on superior customer service to create an attractive proposition for new customers, and the Microsoft CCF helps the company to realize this by delivering better information faster to customer service representatives. The highly integrated solution gives the service agents immediate access to all of the information they need to serve customers, to maximize agent productivity and customer satisfaction.

“With CCF, our customer service champions have a single desktop application through which they can administer all aspects of our interaction with our users, from troubleshooting a technical problem to connecting a new mobile phone to the network,” Rubeck said. “This solution will allow us to provide the highest level of customer service and satisfaction to our valued customers, providing us with real advantage over others in the market.”