Middle East Call Centre 2006 Award winners feted

In a gala dinner hosted by INSIGHTS and attended by many of the region's top call centre personalities, nominees for the Awards were honoured in three different categories - Middle East Call Centre Of The Year 2006, Middle East Call Centre Manager Of The Year 2006 and Middle East Call Centre Outsourcing Service Provider Of The Year 2006.

INSIGHTS' president, Dominick Keenaghan, kicked off the Awards evening by describing how rigorous the judging process was in 2006 compared to how the scheme was when first launched in 2001. Then all applicants had to do was write an essay covering various current aspects of their call center and the plans in place for development. The essays were then marked subjectively by a panel of two industry professionals. In contrast, in 2006, applicants were not only faced with a rigorous, multi-page questionnaire that explored all key aspects of their business strategy, customer management initiatives and operational plans but they had to collect and submit relevant supporting documentation and data that took a considerable amount of time and effort to prepare. These applications were then assessed by a special INSIGHTS-formulated judging panel of regional industry experts. For satisfactory submissions, there followed a site visit by one of the judging panel and the purpose of which was to validate the submission and gain some further key overall qualitative impressions of the call center.

Keenaghan confirmed, "This was, by design, the most challenging and stringent Awards process the regional industry has ever seen. We were very pleased with the number of entrants and absolutely astounded by the superior quality of the submissions. Following the site visits, the competition process mandated that a maximum of 3 entries be nominated for each of the three categories. The fact that a company was nominated is therefore is something that they can be extremely proud of, and they can now rank themselves in the top 3 in their category in the region."

At the gala dinner, a lively and fun-filled Awards ceremony first of all honoured all the nominees as "the best of the best "in each of their category's followed by the announcement of the actual Award winner. In the Middle East Call Centre Outsourcing Service Provider Of The Year 2006 category the honours were claimed by Xceed Contact Centre of Egypt. In the Middle East Call Centre Of The Year 2006 section the winner was Saudi-based Arab National Bank and for the much sought after Middle East Call Centre Manager Of The Year 2006 title the garlands went to Ruth Birkin of the Oman-based Gulf Air Call Centre.

Speaking enthusiastically after a nail-biting evening, a visibly elated, Ruth Birkin explained that whilst Oman is not a traditional call center location, our achievements is these Awards show that we can compete with the best. This was truly a team effort and a tribute to the 200 enthusiastic and highly professional Omanis in our call center. An equally proud Dr Adel Danish, Chairman and CEO of Xceed gushed, "With winning this Award, Xceed confirms its ongoing commitment to deliver high quality service and value-added processes to it's regional and global clients, which include some of the world's largest and most respected companies, whilst continually Xceeding client expectations."

Keenaghan concluded, "The scheme we ran this year demonstrates both the quality and the ongoing improvements taking place in the regional call center industry. In fact, now that the word is out about how useful such an Awards scheme is for helping to stimulate ongoing performance development, we are already being approached by both applicants and sponsors for next years Awards."