Khaleej Times hosts CX focused executive roundtable in partnership with Tanla

Khaleej Times, in association with Tanla Platforms, a global cloud communications leader, successfully hosted a CX roundtable engagement on February 16 at Address Skyview in Downtown, Dubai.

The in-person discussion featured customer experience (CX) leaders from some of the largest enterprise organisations in the region, sharing their insights around the theme ‘CX Transformed: Building meaningful digital experiences for customer delight’.

The session explored the latest trends, opportunities and challenges faced by CX leaders from various quarters. Setting the event's tone, the session kickstarted with a keynote address from Sonia Kaul, VP Product Marketing and Digital Enablement at Tanla Platforms, highlighting their functional and technical capabilities, market dominance, customer base and product offerings. This was followed by a technical deep dive by Serkan Ibrahim, VP – Europe at Kore.ai, who brought the focus towards artificial intelligence (AI) with the theme ‘Conversational AI: Adopting disruptive technology in a non-disruptive way’.

The roundtable discussion pointed out how CX has evolved across organisations with respect to consumer demands, the widely accepted and popular channels of customer communications, ROI expectations with CX-related technology deployments.

The digital boardroom witnessed contributors from well-known organizations such as Etihad Airways, Majid Al Futtaim Retail, Mastercard, Talabat, Landmark Group, Emirates Post, Dubai Roads and Transport Authority, Emirates Insurance, Cigna, Aramex, Virgin Mobile, Commercial Bank of Dubai etc. as they discussed the critical role played by ‘People, Process, Tools and Data’ when it comes to driving CX across the value chain.

The powerful 90-minute discussion in the form of a roundtable engagement explored the need for and importance of conversational AI across different digital touchpoints and channels, and how it can create more personalized, efficient, and satisfying interactions with customers. The discussion also uncovered some of the challenges and considerations that arise when implementing conversational AI, as well as best practices for ensuring that these systems are purpose-driven, and helps organizations, and the workforce to achieve their CX objectives.

Sharing her thoughts on this, Sonia Kaul said, “This roundtable has reaffirmed our understanding that though Conversational Automation has consistently been one of the fastest-growing drivers of CX transformation initiatives at various enterprises, the adoption of newer social channels like Whatsapp and the recent unprecedented levels of success of ChatGPT has bolstered the interest and focus on the art and science of conversational AI.

“We are seeing conversational automation helping businesses cater to the need for instant gratification by solving a wide variety of customer queries instantly and increasing brand loyalty. One of the largest benefits that have emerged is that enterprises can communicate with their customers and establish more 1:1 relationships at scale without any significant increase in CRM costs.”

An expert on conversational AI, Serkan Ibrahim shared with us his perspective on the discussion too. He said, “We are now at the intersection where human to machine interactions are revolutionizing customer experience and driving meaningful connections and transactions between organizations their employees, and customers. “

As the co-hosts of the roundtable, Tanla’s spokesperson commented that it is becoming increasingly important to keep bringing together Industry leaders in such forums as conducted in partnership with Khaleej Times to ensure a more collaborative and progressive approach in building effective customer experiences. It gave us impressive insights into how leaders and brands from different sectors are exploring the use of conversational AI for complex areas of consumer operations to make engagement with users more efficient, effective and complete.

The CX roundtable engagement served as a need-of-the-hour strategic discussion, focusing on thought leaders sharing their insights, and opinions, and guiding other leaders, especially addressing the challenges associated with customer-facing teams in today’s world order.

• UAE