STC Bahrain transforms the country’s B2B telecom sector and empowers customers.

When telecoms company STC Bahrain adopted the motto ‘LET’S GO FORWARD’ it kicked off an initiative set to transform the country’s B2B telecom sector and empower customers with smarter, best-in class services by the end of 2021. The company, founded in 2010, is known as a disruptor in the market, and has been leading the way for innovation for some time.

WE’RE VERY CUSTOMER-CENTRIC. WE’VE WON MULTIPLE AWARDS FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE, AND WITH SALESFORCE, WE’RE GETTING READY TO TAKE IT TO THE NEXT LEVEL
Revealed Jinane Saliba, Senior Director of Business Operations at the
company.

To make sure it’s meeting customer expectations, the company runs annual surveys to capture feedback. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, STC Bahrain needed to rapidly adapt services to support customers through a difficult time.
“The pandemic had a major impact on finance, but by staying close to customers and giving them incentives to pay a percentage of their outstanding bills we made it through,” explained Saliba. “With more people working from home we also ramped up our service and product portfolios, rolling out more cybersecurity solutions for example.”

Reacting quickly to change with agile technology.

To react quickly to change, STC Bahrain relies on agile technology and rich customer insights, and thanks to Salesforce, it has both. The company kicked off its digital transformation with Sales Cloud in 2016.

Impressed with its user-friendly interface, flexibility, and scalability, it extended its functionality with Xactly in 2020.

Their implementation partner Changi helped to:
customize and roll out the solution, running weekly workshops to understand STC Bahrain’s business goals and optimize the platform accordingly.

ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS ABOUT SALESFORCE IS HOW MUCH GUIDANCE THERE IS ON USING THE SOLUTIONS ONLINE.
OUR USERS ARE VERY HAPPY WITH IT AND WE’VE NOW LEARNED TO CONFIGURE IT IN-HOUSE.
revealed Saliba

Today, the platform underpins the entire B2B sales operation from lead to conversion. It integrates seamlessly with the company’s other systems and the team can access it via mobile or desktop. Changi helped the company to add customizations to support sector-specific requirements such as debt collection to streamline more processes from a single solution.

Getting smarter with richer data insights

Salesforce and Xactly integrate with the company’s central data lake to capture
and analyze data from across the sales cycle. Data is fed into dashboards to give reps a quick, visual overview to help them track performance and monitor KPIs.
Xactly also underpins the incentives program, which allows account managers to automatically calculate their bonus based on KPIs, and an integration with the ERP system makes it easy for them to collect payments.

“We’ve got custom dashboards for every business unit,” commented Saliba. “The management team can use them to check how reps are performing and offer them more support to meet their targets. We can also pull executive-level reports really easily.”
This replaces a manual reporting process that was time-consuming and rigid, meaning reps couldn’t pull monthly, weekly, or daily reports with the latest, real-time data. In fact, Salesforce automation across the sales cycle has freed up 30% more time for reps to spend engaging with customers.
“Data doesn’t just help us get closer to customers, we can also check out our competition and use those insights to augment our portfolio and wallet share,” adds Saliba.

Identifying more opportunities for success

Better visibility also helps the sales team to identify opportunities to cross- and up-sell to customers, and with better segmentation – which is being rolled out currently – the team will be able to find more relevant products quickly and easily, ultimately enabling them to deliver more value to customers.

Next, the company is planning to implement CPQ, part of Revenue Cloud. “As a tech person I love CPQ! It’s got a really simple interface so everyone can use it, and it’s really useful to be given prompts on the next best action,” said Saliba.

Staff at STC Bahrain have flourished since the Salesforce implementation. And once it’s finished implementing the solution in-house it plans to become a reseller, giving customers the opportunity to benefit from its Sales Cloud, Xactly, and CPQ solution as a service.

This will empower customers to create their own quotes, which can then
be converted into a sale in less than five days – much faster than the
current process.

A one stop shop for innovation

AS THE COMPANY CONTINUES ITS DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION, IT’S WELL ON THE PATH TO UNLOCKING 360-DEGREE VISIBILITY OF THE
CUSTOMER, AND HAS PLANS TO INTEGRATE ITS WEBSITE, PARTNER, AND CUSTOMER COMMUNITY WITH SALESFORCE.
“Our goal is to have the entire lead to cash journey centralized on one platform,” said Saliba.
“We’ve had a really smooth transition with Salesforce and have eliminated a lot of inefficiencies from our processes – all with no downtime. We can’t wait to share our success as a service to our customers.”

BY 2021

The telecom provider plans to become a digital one stop shop for customers, and is rolling out new features bit by bit – something that no other company currently offers in Bahrain.

SALESFORCE GIVES YOU THE AGILITY TO BUILD, TEST, AND GROW YOUR PLATFORM IN YOUR OWN TIME. WHEN IT COMES TO DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION, THINK AHEAD AND LOOK AT THE BIGGER PICTURE. SALESFORCE IS ALWAYS INNOVATING, AND WE’RE EXCITED TO BE ON
THAT JOURNEY.
Jinane Saliba, Senior Director of Business Operations at STC company