DHL Chief to address inaugural Mid East 'Customer is King' meet

David Wild will present delegates with a case study on 'Customer Relationship and Brand Building.'

"The study will demonstrate the correlation between customer relationship management, branding and customer loyalty," said Wild, who heads an organisation which has numerous awards to its credit, including the Dubai Quality Gold Award for the service industry and the Sheikh Khalifa Award for Excellence.

"Loyalty programmes are a key CRM strategy," explained Wild. "Where many falter is in a lack of knowledge of how to build and manage customer relationships through these programmes."

DHL UAE recently launched DHL Altitude, a unique customer loyalty programme in response to extensive market demand. Key brands within the Emirates have tied up with DHL's express

Altitude scheme to deliver benefits on airline tickets, shopping and leisure activity vouchers.

"Clients told us that a rewards scheme means a lot to them and we responded," said Wild.

DHL has extensive CRM experience, particularly through the operation of a 24-hour customer call centre at its US $4 million Air Express Centre in Dubai, where a 60-strong multi-lingual team handles an average of 3,000 calls a day.

Within the last 18 months the DHL UAE call centre has undergone a major upgrade following the commissioning of an ambitious customer satisfaction survey carried out by research company MEMRB. The survey took in 421 DHL corporate users and 381 non-users.

"The results were encouraging with 87% saying they were committed to DHL and 70% stating they would retain the company in the future. Four out of every five respondents said they would recommend DHL to others," explained Wild.

"The upgrade also gave us numerous other advantages, such as identifying problems, driving process improvements, which bring value to both our own business and more importantly our customers, and the segmentation of customers, which helps us to better harness their loyalty."

SpeedBooking and SpeedTracking services through interactive voice response were brought to the region by DHL. The UAE was also the world's first remote test site for the DHL Express proprietary Regional Interactive Voice Response System (RIVR), which delivers the company's leading-edge SpeedBooking and SpeedTracking services.

DHL UAE invested US $60,000 installing the system, which provides SpeedBooking and SpeedTracing services which delivers instant answers to pick-up and tracking requests over the phone at a touch of a button.

"These are the techniques and processes we hope to share with delegates to this director-level strategic conference."