British Telecom Wins Multi-Million Dollar Etihad Airways Contract

Etihad Airways has signed a five-year, multi-million dollar agreement with BT (British Telecom), one of the world’s leading providers of communications services and solutions, to virtualise its global contact centres.

The partnership will help the airline enhance the passenger experience by reducing call waiting times, introducing new service capabilities, and provide services in 15 languages.

The BT Cloud Contact Cisco enables Etihad Airways to seamlessly route calls from 40 countries to any one of 450 multi-lingual agents available across its three contact centres in Abu Dhabi and Al Ain in the UAE, and Manchester in England.

Call and screen recording improves quality control, while workforce optimisation tools enable reduced call waiting times and speech analytics enable detailed reporting to improve processes for guests.

“We are always searching for new ways to raise the guest experience bar and this intelligent, reliable technology will help us achieve that by making a significant difference to our contact centre management,” said Peter Baumgartner, Etihad Airways’ Chief Commercial Officer. “With this agile, innovative solution, our contact centre teams can now efficiently manage inbound traffic and virtualise resources. It helps us work smartly, but importantly, it supports the company’s rapid global growth with an increased focus on the guest.”

Etihad Airways’ three virtually integrated contact centres operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and manage more than three million calls per year from around the world.

The airline is committed to developing and retaining local talent as part of its Emirati-first approach, and to invest in Abu Dhabi. Two of the airline’s three contact centres are located in the Emirate, with the Al Ain contact centre solely managed by female UAE nationals. In 2014, Etihad Airways opened an additional wing of the award-winning Al Ain centre and now has 150 Emirati staff working there, who last year answered over one million calls.

Luis Alvarez, CEO, BT Global Services, said, “We are proud to work with Etihad Airways for the first phase of its Global Contact Centre Virtualisation project and to be a provider of their global customer experience platform. Adding to a long-standing expertise in the delivery of enterprise-grade cloud services, we have a wealth of knowledge and experience in managing contact centres for some of the world’s leading brands, including in the airline industry. Through our Cloud Contact platform we are looking forward to delivering to Etihad Airways a world-class, “evergreen” contact centre with the very latest technology.”