Customer Engagement Technology (CET) Conference 2019 - Sessions & Details

Customer Engagement Technology (CET) Conference is a platform that connects the major industry players of the region with key decision-makers across all sectors to discuss the most cutting-edge innovations and upcoming trends that help shape the future of the business-customer relationship.

The event successfully brings together over 300 participants to discover the latest solutions that enable greater customer experience in various industries.
In this conference, you’ll meet digital, marketing, branding and heads of IT from leading organizations of the region as emerging trends are predicted, best practices are explained and some of the biggest case studies are shared.

The 2019’s CET Conference was held in JW Marriott Hotel Kuwait City on the 25th of September, 2019.

Below are the occurred sessions in the same order:

Welcome Note

- Nayab Rafiq, CEO, Pinnacle Middle East

Linking Digital Transformation with Technology, Customer Experience and Citizen Engagement in Kuwait

- Qusai Al-Shatti, Former Deputy Director General for Information Technology Sector, Kuwait’s Central Agency for Information Technology

• People are increasingly avoiding ads, and they prefer to pay the 1.99$ to block ads on apps.
• As an example of the Power of Social Media Advertisement, in Zwara’s (Zwara is a Kuwaiti Tea Party), there was a chocolate brand:
o In the year 2015, no one was buying it and most people prefer international brands.
o In the year 2017, all people are buying and talking about the brand in most events.

Who’s the Biggest Winner of Social Media Marketing

- Jafar Mousawi, CEO, SquareMedia

• If you want to do celebrity endorsement, you need to be ready, or else you’ll shutdown.
• If you created a social media campaign and got many impressions but no clicks, then your visuals are bad.
• Re-targeting gets you a lot of business.

The Speed of Culture: Human-Centric Ideas Worth Talking About

- Benjamin Ampen, Managing Director – MENA, Twitter

• Moment versus Movement is explained in the next charts.
o The moment is a chart with 1 high curve on the first day, a very smaller curve on the next day, and nothing on day 3.
o The movement is a chart with 3 high curves, the highest on day 1, medium on day 2, and also medium on day 3. The key difference is in day 3.
• Twitter is a “Look at this” social media platform, while all others are “Look at me”.

The Rise of the DXPs: Rethinking the Digital Transformation

- Moussalam Dalati, General Manager – Middle East, Liferay

• DXP stands for Digital Experience Platforms
• A good example of how the economy had changed regarding a birthday cake:
o Agrarian economy: was when the mother buys the cake ingredients for 5$ and she cooks it at home.
o Product economy: the mother pass by the nearest supermarket or bakery to buy a cake for 20$ to save the time of cooking it at home.
o Services economy: the mother is busier due to her job, so for 25$, she ordered a cake by home delivery service that arrived with her when she’s back home. She paid 20$ for the cake and 5$ for the delivery service.
o Experience economy (current one): the mother is also busy to think and apply a birthday theme decoration, so she paid 100$ for a catering company to handle all the birthday party including the cake by their choice.

Panel Session: Redeveloping your Social Media and Digital Marketing Strategy for the 2020 Customer

- Jafar Mousawi, CEO, SquareMedia
- Amani Khalaf, Marketing Leader, Careem
- Andrew Ward, VP - Marketing & Customer Experience, Jazeera Airways
- Yusuf Jehangir, AGM - Head of Marketing and Products, Ahli Bank of Kuwait

• Andrew Ward (Jazeera Airways) said that they were running online campaigns that weren’t performing well until they started offline campaigns on newspapers, buses, billboards to get many more engagements.
• Jafar Mousawi (SquareMedia) disagreed Andrew’s opinion and said that offline marketing & billboards are just showing muscles (عرض عضلات) to prove that the company is powerful and can pay.
• Jafar added and insisted that online marketing & especially retargeting is what brings real engagements.
• Jafar commented on billboards that it may only be effective because of the traffic advantage.
• Yusuf Jehangir (Ahli Bank) disagreed Jafar’s opinion about retargeting, and gave an example of an incident that happened with him in Kuwait City, where he searched online for “ATM Deposit” to find the nearest machine, but the next day onwards, he started to see plenty of “retargeted” ads about ATMs, deposits, banks, and similar. So, he found this technology as strange and creepy.

SAP Customer Experience in the Experience Economy

- Salah Ahmed, Customer Experience Solutions Engineer, SAP

Salah Ahmed explained SAP software and talked about its advantages.

Panel Session: How are eCommerce and mCommerce Redefining the Era of the Online Marketplace?

- Abdulaziz Al-Dhubaib, CEO, Nizek
- Rejin Geo, Director Of eCommerce, Leading eCommerce Organization
- Ayaat Morgan, Omni-Channel Specialist, Ali Abdulwahab Al Mutawa Commercial Co.

Digital Innovation for Digital Customer Experience

- Jamshaid Ashraf, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Digital Processing Systems

Interactive Workshop: Understanding the Customer Experience using Journey Mapping

- Amol Kadam, Co-Founder, RBBi

Mapping a Seamless Customer Experience Journey and Aligning Digital and Non-Digital Channel

- Karl D’Souza, Head of Experience Design – Digital Innovation Center, Boubyan Bank

How to Build a Local Brand in Emerging Countries with Higher ROI

- Hussein El-Sayed, COO, BSmart Consulting

Panel Session: The Next Wave of Transformation & Innovation and its Impact on Leadership, Decision Making, and Customer Experience

- Prerita Puri, Business and Customer Alliances Head, Trejhara
- Dr. Thalaya Alfozan, IT Director at Kuwait University, IT Consultant at Kuwait Ministry of Finance
- Mohamed Alsaadany, Digital Transformation & IT Technology Consultant, Kuwait Civil Service Commission
- Sheharyar Arshad, Business Technology Leader, Kuwait Telecommunication Company VIVA

• Dr. Thalaya Alfozan said that the below will take over in the next few years:
o Machine Learning (ML) – after the unlimited computing & processing power (CPU)
o Mobility
o Internet of Things (IoT)
o Artificial Intelligence (AI)
o Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Chatbots.
• Dr. Thalaya added that there aren’t enough investments in Kuwait in Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects.
• Mohamed Alsaadany confirmed that we should invest in and fund local AI projects.
• Sheharyar said that our biggest mistake now is the lack of automation, the automatic delivery of services.
• Sheharyar added that the average revenue per user is declining globally, now it is 2% only.
• Dr. Thalaya again said that we should think about how to transform people before transforming technologies.
• Prerita assured on all what was said, and added that Blockchain is also among that will take over soon.