Customer intimacy will be key differentiator for Middle East telecoms market, says LogicaCMG

LogicaCMG is a global leader in telecommunications for intuitive messaging, intelligent charging, content enablement and customer intelligence management.

Nabil Y. Khalil, director, telecoms at LogicaCMG in the Middle East and Africa, said: "Mobile service users around the world are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with customer care and service quality issues. This can result in the user churning to another network, a trend that could catch on here too, unless operators act swiftly."

According to independent research commissioned by LogicaCMG in November 2005, more than half of advanced mobile data service users in the UK, for example, have switched mobile network provider in the last three years due to poor customer care services.

"This higher-than-average rate of churn, is symptomatic of the fact, that users expressed a growing dissatisfaction with the quality of service delivery and customer care, which they received from their operator, as service complexity increases," Khalil said. "As operators expand their portfolios to include new and increasingly complex premium data services, customer intimacy is identified as a key factor in fostering loyalty and encouraging the uptake of new, high-revenue offerings."

LogicaCMG is enabling operators to respond to this growing challenge and solve data queries 'right first time' with its new SMART customer care offering, part of the LogicaCMG SMART initiative. An industry first, SMART is dealing with data services challenges in an integral manner.

By tapping straight into the data service network, SMART (marketing) ensures relevant and timely marketing insights, and makes the information actionable by bringing intuitive marketing analytics applications directly into the hands of the marketer.

On day one at 14.40 during next week's 3G>GSM Mobile Middle East and Gulf conference, LogicaCMG's director of marketing for mobile messaging, Steven van Zanen, will address these and other key issues facing regional telecoms operators.

The two-day conference, which will run on September 11 and 12, will highlight how LogicaCMG's SMART initiative can be used as an effective marketing and customer care tool to help operators in the Middle East and Gulf to move ahead of the competition and maintain customer loyalty. Van Zanen will also look at the rising popularity and potential of mobile marketing.

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) suggests that in the next five years, more than half of the brands across the globe (52 per cent) will spend between five and 25 per cent of total marketing budget on mobile marketing and by 2008, 89 per cent of brands will use text and multimedia messaging to reach their audience.

"Above-the-line marketing is not the only way to influence customer behavior. Below-the-line initiatives are becoming more successful because they ensure targeted and customer-centric communications. This creates measurable results and return on investment metrics, which are important to marketers under growing pressure to prove the value of their campaigns," van Zanen added.

LogicaCMG has been operating in the Middle East and Gulf for over two decades, delivering consultancy, systems integration, support and products to a vast majority of GSM operators.