Two years ago, the world came to a screeching halt as the Covid-19 pandemic forced nations to close their borders.
The global crisis revealed a number of flaws in business continuity and disaster recovery plans. In spite of this, organisations across industries have had to quickly adapt in order to ensure the continuity of their operations and services to customers. This signalled the need for enterprises to double down on their investments in digital tools to ensure business resilience.
Staying competitive during such unprecedented times required businesses to rethink and renew their strategies and practices. This presented an opportunity for technology providers to support organisations in embracing innovative products and services that will allow them to survive, thrive and ensure customer retention and loyalty.
Organisations such as Comarch, a global provider of IT products and solutions, have accelerated efforts to enable businesses to enhance areas that will help them to stabilise in the new environment and find the best strategy for the future.
However, while the pandemic was a tailwind for IT companies, it was not without its challenges.
“At the onset of the pandemic, like many organisations, some of our projects faced several bottlenecks. For one, due to the mandated health and safety protocols, we were unable to conduct face-to-face meetings and onsite visits. In order to successfully deliver our customers’ projects, we needed to navigate different logistical hurdles,” explained Michal Koprowski, Senior ICT Consultant, Comarch.
The pandemic proved to be a big test for business strategies. IT providers and their respective customers had to demonstrate flexibility and adapted to the new way of working.
“Prior to the crisis, typical project implementation would start off with meetings with the customers to understand their requirements, before moving to the onsite technical set up, piloting and testing. Of course, everything changed during the pandemic. We had to re-assess our methods and conduct many of our projects remotely,” said Koprowski.
“While this provided a great opportunity for us to support our customers during a tough time, it also presented several challenges. For one, I personally believe that nothing can beat face-to-face interaction with a customer. It helps us gain a more nuanced understanding of what they need for the project. It’s a challenge doing this remotely because it involves a lot of waiting and numerous emails going back and forth.”
For over 20 years, Comarch has been offering Information and Communications Technology (ICT) services, including data centre and cloud solutions. In line with its commitment to the region, Comarch has established two cloud regions in the Middle East out of the 15 data centres it owns globally, enabling them to ensure the low latency of its cloud services.
With the cloud spending in the GCC slated to reach $2.5 billion by 2025, organisations in the region need an ICT partner that can support them with the deployment and maintenance of IT solutions including systems administration, database operations, networking and security.
With its strong infrastructural background and partnerships with top hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Microsoft and Google Cloud, and its team’s expansive knowledge and experience, Comarch was able to successfully provide a wide array of data centre and cloud services to customers in the region despite the constraints presented by the pandemic.
Among the key projects that Comarch was able to roll out effectively during the pandemic was the implementation of a new loyalty system for Saudia, formerly known as Saudi Arabian Airlines, which is the flagship carrier of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The airline is the third-largest in the Middle East in terms of revenue, behind Emirates and Qatar Airways. Saudia operates domestic and international scheduled flights to over 100 destinations in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. The customer needed a loyalty management platform that emanated innovation at every step of the customer experience. It aimed to move past the boundaries of traditional loyalty management programmes and incorporate the latest customer engagement techniques to build stronger relationships with its clients. A feat that Comarch was able to accomplish.
The implementation phase of the project with Saudia started in 2020. During which Comarch covered end-to-end solutions, including the deployment of the Comarch Loyalty Management (CLM), the company’s proprietary software solution. A key aspect of the project entailed the provision of hosting services by Comarch’s ICT division.
Executing the project when the pandemic was in full swing posed several challenges for Comarch. For one, Comarch engineers faced bottlenecks around ensuring the availability of the system for users and processing large amounts of data while enabling the simultaneous implementation of the highest IT security standards. “On top of that, we had to ensure that data processing measures are fully compliant with the legal regulations of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Therefore, the key factor of the success was cooperation with local partners in both the implementation and operation phases. This presented an additional challenge during the pandemic as close communication and arrangements between all the stakeholders had to be established remotely,” explained Koprowski.
With Comarch’s in-depth industry knowledge, comprehensive expertise and experience, the project was completed successfully and on schedule with the loyalty programme going live in 2021.
“As an organisation, our goal has always been about building long-term relationships with our customers. That’s why we believe that it is important for us to understand their environment and business needs, so we can deliver projects that will not only yield profits for them but will also provide them opportunities to further grow their business,” said Koprowski.
He added, “We are proud of how we successfully delivered the Saudia project despite the bottlenecks that remote operations have brought. While the world has now transitioned and embraced remote or hybrid work models, we believe that nothing can replace onsite visits or face-to-face interactions with clients. It enables us to build and maintain personal relationships with our customers, ensuring that we can complete our projects efficiently and effectively.”
CLM is constantly being developed and updated with new features such as Location-based Services and gamification. The innovations concern also the infrastructure layer of the solution. Cloud-native architecture ensures optimal implementation costs, high efficiency, and data security, which ultimately affects the comfort of using the system for users. This means with this platform, Comarch can further help Saudia deliver fresh and innovative offerings to its customers.
