The second GCC Cards Summit has been such a success in Bahrain that organisers Veritas Investments is already working on next year's event.

'This has been a remarkably successful conference bringing together people from across the region, who are not only being updated on developments in the industry but are also actually doing business and going back to work with new solutions for their institutions,' said Veritas executive director Premal Patel.

'We have decided that Bahrain is the natural hub for this event, though we are looking at spinning off specific seminars on specific topics at other venues across the region.'

A good customer experience is the highway to a healthy bottomline for the financial sector was the conclusion of speakers on the closing day of the Summit yesterday at the Movenpick Hotel in Bahrain.

NettPositive co-founder and director Viraj Tyagi said that banks need to define strategies centred around superior customer experience.

He said there was a strong need for loyalty programmes, stressing the need for tangible value and not just free offers.

He also warned that the high-end platinum and gold cards lose all meaning unless the customer service level attached to the cards is also at a premium.

'Ease of transaction is crucial,' he said.

'Banks must ensure that the transaction experience is nurtured, they must go beyond free offers to create added value - and to serve the customer.'

The summit, supported by Arab Financial Services and Bahrain Association of Banks, also highlighted how outsourcing can be leveraged to offer superior banking experience and optimise budgets and resources.

'Complaint response, information delivery, service recovery - as well as customer-tailored solutions are possible with well-selected outsourcing,' said Ernst & Young partner Ranjith Kumar.

Author-it Software Corporation president Steve Davis stressed that content relevance and accuracy is king in this online, offline era.

He said that documentation must be cared for to reduce losses attributed to non-compliance, and indeed inconsistent customer communications and service.

'Reputation management is so delicate in this 24/7 cyber world, and one route to safeguard this is to manage content accuracy, swiftly as well as to redirected production time into front-line tasks,' he said.

'Author-it has been known to save up to 40 per cent of a working day, freeing up more than 64 hours a week per person for deployment elsewhere in the organisation ensuring consistency of content across multi users and documents to boot.'-TradeArabia News Service