ETISALAT (Emirates Telecommunications Company) - ABU DHABI, UAE
Client Service Manager - 02/2008 to 09/2018

Role Outline
The Client service manager position is a client-facing role focused on the TOP 34 customers, delivering ongoing support before and after the sales cycle has completed. The role focuses on relationship-building and proactive support activities which in turn promote overall customer satisfaction, boost product adoption, retention and renewals of contracts for subscribed IT solutions. I managed diverse, high profile and/or key accounts in UAE including oil and gas, local banks and utilities companies based in Abu Dhabi with branches all over UAE.

Achievements

• Developed trusted relationships with key stakeholders and decision makers, understanding and responding to customer needs, and tracking account activity continuously. This was measured by TRIM index and there was improvement of 15 percent compared to before I took up the accounts.
• Understood the key elements of the customer’s environment and updated internal teams how to address them.
• Acted as the main escalation point and the advocate for critical customer issues, collaborating with other departments as needed (24/7) and getting the problems resolved then updating the customer with a rout cause analysis and how it will be prevented in future.
• Facilitated weekly, monthly and quarterly meetings effectively, reviewing performance indicators, setting clear goals and expectations, and documenting discussions and next steps on respective items. The quarterly meetings were with CIOs to keep them updated and map their strategy.
• Aligned Enterprise Support (through the customer care centre) and customers support requirements and suggested offerings to customer based on productized support packages for managed services and enhanced best effort services for key customers.
• Facilitated meetings and reviews with customers, including quarterly feature reviews with senior management and made the quarterly service performance review presentation, which was attended by either our senior director or VP. This was very effective because the customers (managers) used this to open up about strategy and we were able to get business upgrades or learn about critical customer pain points form a high level to address.
• Engaged cross-functional resources both internally and within the customer organizations to align on problem solving activities and I was successful in spite challenges of operating across organizational boundaries.
• Assisted in knowledge transfer between customer and internal teams formally and informally.
• Effectively manage time, workload and shifting priorities because the customers timetables changed suddenly sometimes.
• Sometimes provided off-hours (nights, weekends) support with unplanned outages, key projects and go-lives because the customers networks and IT services have to run 24/7 and unplanned downtime was not acceptable but inevitably it happened.
• Communicated effectively with customers both verbally and in writing to report on projects I was managing, sales proposals, payments and operations.
• Received and embraced feedback (formally and informally) and helped the organization turn mistakes into opportunities (like, we got to sell managed services to the customer after a critical failure when I explained how this service would have helped mitigate the situation).
• Up to 50% of my time was spent at customer sites interacting formally and informally with IT staff and managers.

Lead IT Support Coordinator - Lucent Technologies Inc (EMEA),
Abu Dhabi, UAE (09/1998 – 11/2007)

Role Summary
Responsible for running all the IT functions to support business activities in the Middle East and Africa offices of Lucent Technologies(UAE, South Africa, Iraq, Pakistan and Saudi), and member of the globally IT team governed, regionally from Hilversum Netherlands and Swindon UK.

Key responsibilities
• Performed all IT support work in UAE by myself including (but not limited to ) System administration, IT infrastructure management, identity management (creating user logins, security ID tokens and access controls) and controlling Servers, MS Active Directory, Linux, Unix servers and MS Web servers (MS IIS), WAN, LAN and Datacentre and all technical support for IT end users based on ITIL governance process.
• Led IT Software procurement, information security management, preparing annual budgets, being accountable for IT assets, software licence contracts, warranties, maintenance contracts and inventory.
• Captured and presented service performance Reports; Risk analysis Reports; critical service disruptions Reports; Operational Reports; Management Reports; Service Desk Reports and backup and recovery reports to EMEA regional HQ as necessary.
• Managed data access security securing data exchange with External organizations, access control to data stored on servers, managing contingency and disaster recovery plans, and preventing attacks from viruses and malware.

Business management, sales, marketing, Data communications, managing organisations in a technological age

Electrical engineering, Electronics, computing methods, Communications technologies, Communications theory, Antennae Technologies, Management options