Saudi Telecom Company (STC) has awarded a contract to Logica, the global solutions company, to establish a customer relationship management (CRM) and multichannel customer contact center for STC’s mobile telecoms business. In order to maintain its market leadership after deregulation, STC is creating a comprehensive CRM strategy. The Logica-developed contact center will be critical to STC’s first phase of its overall CRM initiative. The solution will consist of Logica combining three existing call centers in Jeddah, Riyadh and Dammam into one “virtual call center,” which will ultimately enable STC to decrease costs and increase effectiveness. The initiative enables STC to route calls efficiently to the three call centers, manage call center staff, record voice calls and introduce new channels of communication — including short message service (SMS), interactive voice response (IVR), and fax — to its customers. Logica has partnered with Cisco to help deliver the solution. This first phase of STC’s customer care initiative focuses on “communicational CRM,” or the creation of infrastructure that enables faster and more efficient handling of customer inquiries. The remaining two phases of STC’s strategy will include “operational CRM,” giving STC employees a toolset of enhanced software that provides a unified view of each STC customer and “analytical CRM,” the ability to perform trend analysis and create business intelligence in order to offer more tailored products and services to existing and new customers. Additionally, STC has expanded its messaging capacity through Logica’s completion of the deployment of its Short Message Service Center (SMSC). This deal, in partnership with Avaya Communications, represents a major investment in future SMS capacity by STC, as it anticipates that text messaging volume will more than double in the Kingdom within the next twelve months.