Al Rajhi, the world’s leading Islamic bank, uplevels customer experience with Dynamics 365

Based in Riyadh, Al Rajhi is the Middle East’s largest financial services institution. Comprising more than 570 branches, 5,000 ATMs, 75,000 merchant point of sale (POS) terminals, and serving 18 million customers, Al Rajhi boasts the largest customer base of any bank in the Kingdom. To unify and consolidate its infrastructure, enhance company-wide collaboration, and match rising customer expectations, the bank set out to enhance its digital transformation, with the objective of placing the customer first―at the heart of the entire banking experience. 

“This is not an abstract IT project,” says Turki Aldhfayan, Chief Customer Experience Officer at Al Rajhi. "We’re not changing our strategy for the sake of digital, but to create the most seamless experience for our customers.” 

Hazem Abdalla, Al Rajhi’s AGM IT Solution Delivery, agrees. “Our focus is to make everything our customers are used to doing physically, possible digitally; so they can use our services anytime, anywhere, with the ultimate aim to reduce the time required to make a transaction.”

One consolidated customer-centric system 

Al Rajhi spent three years making headway behind the scenes, upgrading its legacy infrastructure and numerous digital channels. But facilitating 24/7 customer access to Al Rajhi services necessitated a major back office systems overhaul. This pointed to Microsoft’s customer relationship management (CRM) system, Dynamics 365. 

The bank’s Chief Architect, Hussein Al-Aaraj, underscores the scope of the project. “We had different customer touchpoints, which meant dealing with different channels, procedures, and systems, sometimes inconsistently. We needed a solution that could mobilize all our processes and customer information onto one unified platform―and align them to support the customer journey end to end.”

Streamlining processes for a seamless experience

The bank credits Microsoft partner and implementation expert EJADA Systems, which built a strong, sophisticated integration layer that makes it even simpler to reach a 360-degree understanding of the customer. The results are convincing. “Customer problem resolution time has dropped by 300 to 400 percent; onboarding of new customers is 50 percent faster; 200-plus back-end services have been fully integrated with digital channels; and lost or stolen credit card assistance has been cut from 3 minutes to under 10 seconds,” according to Ahmed Hafez, Program Manager at Al Rajhi.

“While it’s fantastic for our customers, it also empowers our employees. With our new unified system, our call agents handle up to twice as many calls every day,” points out Al-Aaraj. “Simply put, thanks to Microsoft Dynamics, serving our customers is now easier, smoother, and faster.”