MENA’s digital economy at a highly exciting stage

Customer centricity shouldn’t be lost at any point. That’s a crucial component of omni-channel – to be able to offer meaningful services to customers in line with their channel of choice, to build a strong relationship with them, also educating them about various ways this channel can be leveraged, asserts Jennie Wright, head of digital experience, du.

RetailME speaks to Wright about the state of digital economy in the region

How is the regional digital economy performing?

We’re at a very exciting stage in terms of growth of the digital economy in the MENA region, which is set to double in the next three years.

What kind of digital initiatives are you undertaking at du?

du is very focussed on delivering a delightful digital customer experience. We’ve invested heavily in our app to self-serve customers, while enabling them to choose the channel of choice. We’ve made a lot of investments in digital services.

We’ve some very interesting fledgling businesses, exploiting the electronic payment dynamics within retail. Take the example of our partnership with Beam Wallet. It’s a three-way partnership for us with around 2,000 retailers and over 100,000 customers. While it allows our customers to redeem coupons, it helps us to spread our network.

We’ve also started a wellness hub – one stop-shop and very unique in its approach. For this we’ve engaged with 30 retailers in the region to make this initiative work.

Did you find RetailME Connect useful?

It’s a fantastic initiative. We should hold such knowledge-oriented roundtable discussions more often. Considering the make-up of the region, which is very unique acting as a melting pot of nationalities, such platforms will only help us in embracing omni-channel aptly by exchanging knowledge and experiences from different matured markets. It will definitely take us a step further to be able to optimally leverage omni-channel – something that we want to achieve at du.