Outbound Call Center Featured Article

UAE Airline Opens All-Woman Call Center

By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor

While the outside world may think of the gleaming cities in the United Arab Emirates as distinctly modern – with all that adjective brings with it, including gender equality – it's still unusual to find Emirati women working outside the home. The reason is that patriarchal ideas that women should not mix with men they are neither married nor related to persist, leading to low employment in places like Dubai or Abu Dhabi...even college educated women.

However, leaving a substantial chunk of college educated adults (more women than men attend college in the United Arab Emirates) out of the workforce is contrary to economic prosperity, something the UAE has been famous for as of late.

One company, Abu Dhabi-based Eithad Airways, has decided to both comply with tradition and take advantage of it by opening an all-female call center to provide customer support for the airline's customers. The new call center, which opened with 80 agents and has now nearly doubled in size, is located in the university city of Al Ain, about two hours east of its main office at Abu Dhabi International Airport, reports the New York Times today.

The concept would appear to be working well for all parties involved, says airline spokespeople.

“They’re more comfortable, and their families are more comfortable,” Samia Barj, manager of the all-woman center, told the New York Times. “Their husbands, their fathers, their families, they are all happy with that.”

But the contact center was not without barrier to success at first, says the company's director of human resources, Ray Gammell, who is originally from Ireland. Residents of the UAE, who are often wealthy, are used to getting service from others, he says...not giving it to others. To help overcome this, the call center's employees – almost all of whom are college educated – were told to view callers and airline passengers as “guests” rather than “customers,” which makes call center work seem more like offering hospitality rather than providing service.

“If you think about the callers as guests,” said one call center employee to the New York Times, “you focus on your guest. We treat him with very high respect. We’re not serving, he is our guest.”