Telecom firm shows the way for women employment

AWAL, a subsidiary of Saudi Telecom Company (STC), has employed 100 Saudi women to work from home. The women provide call center services on the AWAL cloud computing system that serves over 5,000 clients a day.
At a press conference yesterday, Abdullah Al-Salamah, head of the firm's innovative educational technologies division, urged "the Ministry of Labor and institutions in the private and public sectors to adopt a system that would help to provide jobs for thousands of Saudi women, who can discharge their duty while attending to their responsibilities at home.”
He said the service reduces operational costs by eliminating the need for office space, infrastructure, a specialized call center, hardware and software, equipment, and the need for dedicated IT staff for maintenance services.
“One of the Saudi government’s strategic employment plans is to provide decent jobs for 20 percent of the women in the country,” he said. The initiatives comply with the directives of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah to provide decent jobs for women that meet the norms of Saudi society. Al-Salamah said the country needs to tap the potential of its women, who represent 50 percent of the population. The new system will enable a large number of Saudi women who studied abroad to join the workforce.
"Such a working environment is critically needed in Saudi Arabia," he added. To remain competitive today, businesses have to increase customer satisfaction while maximizing productivity, he added.
He said call centers are critical to ensure the delivery of superior services and support to both existing and potential clients. Many companies are moving away from the beaten track and adopting a virtual call center. The traditional call centers require all agents to reside in a single location and are managed by a team of on-site supervisors.
AWAL Call Center Services (ACCS) offers an unprecedented opportunity to achieve these objectives with the added benefit of lowering total cost of ownership and operations while maximizing reliability and scalability, he added. Abdurahman Obaied, AWAL marketing director, said ACCS is a virtual call center where organizations, institutions or firms do not work from the organization’s offices, but from different geographical locations, including their homes.
Outlining the benefits of the services, Obaied said it boosts staffing flexibility with the freedom to deploy call center agents anywhere. They would only need an Internet connection, browser and IP telephone.