Waleed AlHamdan has worked in and around Saudi CX nearly three decades, long before Saudi Arabia had a word for it. We sat down with him as CXM Academy begins building its Saudi presence, with Waleed as the local lead.
I fell in love with it on my first day in banking, and I never left. Ten years in the financial sector here in Saudi, then American Express opened in the Kingdom and gave me the chance of my life. They were moving sixty thousand customers over from Bahrain, and customer service was seven call-centre agents and a telephone. Basically, a receptionist. Head office wanted to move all Saudi customers to Saudi, so I went to the Head of Operations and said, the Saudis will not accept this, not under the American Express name. Give me the chance to build it properly.
In six months, we went from seven agents to twelve, built the contact centre, then the premium department, the travel and hospitality desk, Centurion, the Black Card. Each launch won number one in the Middle East. I became head of CX for AMEX Saudi, spent some time in the UK, then moved into retail, running CX across six automotive companies. In 2016 I started my own business: training, consulting, and voice-of-customer technology under one roof.
Vision 2030 launched and CX was named as a pillar. It was the best time for our work. Then the pandemic came, and it was a challenging time for us. We spent three years barely taking money. Eventually a company acquired the business. I was going to retire. My wife gave me two months before I would do something else. She was right. I opened a small CX practice, freelance and training, and that is when I met Michel Stevens and CXM Academy.
I worked with some of them in this market for years, so I know them well. CXPA is a certificate, not a training programme, if you manage to pass it. Others, like CX University and CX Academy, are good. But two things. First, they speak from a selling perspective and don't speak to our needs as a Saudi market, and they are not really here, you log on online and that is it. Second, the content.
CXM Academy has stories and examples in the curriculum that none of the others have, and the curriculum is updated every few months. When I went through the foundation and saw the Bang and Olufsen examples, the way the business case is made, I knew this was different. That is what makes a decision-maker's eyes light up. They are hearing about the brands they want to become.
Yes, and it sounds like a contradiction until you see it every week. The pressure to do CX comes from regulation. The regulators, SAMA for finance, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Commerce, all set targets. NPS above eighty. Customer satisfaction reported every quarter. So organisations hire, fast, to show they are doing something.
But where do the people come from? Often a contact centre, which is a reactive department, or marketing, which treats CX as a tool to sell, or, more recently, IT, because the Vision said digitalise everything. None of those backgrounds were taught what CX actually is. So you get a head of CX who is brilliant and hard-working and cannot translate that need into a case the board understands.
We hear the frustration every week: people who want to show the value they bring and don't know how to turn it into something the business recognises. Waleed, how do we do this, they ask me. The fear is real. They worry about not being able to prove their value and what they contribute to the organisation; too often they see themselves as problem-solvers or initiative-handlers focused only on how to improve sales.
Technology. A platform that measures and produces a dashboard. It feels safe, push the button and the score appears. Then a regulator or an auditor asks, why did you ask this question, why is the score this number, and they have no answer. That is the moment they look for training. Not before.
NPS is measured by transaction here, not by emotion. CSAT the same. These tools were never built to measure emotion, and yet emotion is the whole game. I say it in every seminar and every training I run. You are not measuring what you think you are measuring. If you understand the circumstances that create the score, you can steer it. If you only watch the score, you can only react.
Trust. Someone buys an apartment for over a million riyals and waits four, five, sometimes six years for it to be built. That is not a transaction, that is trust over time. And in Saudi the decision is not one person. It is the husband, the wife, the parents, the uncles, the relatives. Trust here travels by word of mouth, in gatherings. One good experience and the whole family calls the developer. One bad one and it travels just as fast.
"There is also a generation change. The people buying now grew up with Vision 2030. They want a compound, a safe place where their family can walk, neighbours from anywhere in the world. The old script does not work on them. The staff selling and serving them have to understand a customer who thinks completely differently from ten years ago.
Many incumbent banks still operate as if it is 2010 and everything is fine. Their processes are wrapped in history and red tape, and even when leadership wants to change, they do not know how. There is a belief of we already know what the customer needs, so don't tell us. And when commercial pressure rises, they fall back on the old patterns.
The real work is not training the CX team. It is influencing the whole system. The person who processes the debit card, the person who writes the statement, they all decide the experience. That is exactly what CXM Academy teaches: you cannot fix the experience by training one team
Two things they cannot get anywhere else. The content speaks their language, in Arabic, with local examples the companies know, alongside the global cases. And it does not stop at a certificate, CXM Academy runs both online and in-person workshops to make sure the curriculum lands as real understanding, not just theory. Anyone who completes the full curriculum can become a training partner themselves, in line with CXM Academy's training-partner requirements. I am not just handing someone a piece of paper. I am handing them a path, and an opportunity.
The whole market keeps telling people CX is a marketing badge to collect. We are here to show it is a business discipline that earns its place. That is the difference, and that is why I joined.
Twice named best customer experience consultant in the Gulf region, Waleed is consultant to the region's CX awards and a Recognised Training Partner for CXM Academy in Saudi Arabia. He has led customer experience at American Express in the Kingdom and across the retail and real-estate sectors, and has spoken about CX on Saudi national television.
