Waqf Fund organizes 13th Corporate Governance workshop on customer-centricity

Waqf Fund organizes 13th Corporate Governance workshop on customer-centricity

Manama, Bahrain – The Waqf Fund organized its 13th Corporate Governance workshop in the Kingdom of Bahrain to discuss the topic of customer-centricity. The senior management of Waqf Fund member institutions including seven CEOs were among the 43 participants of the workshop.

Mr. Khalid Hamad Al-Hamad, Executive Director Banking Supervision at the CBB and Chairman of the Waqf Fund welcomed the participants and introduced the instructor, Dr. Nabil El-Hage, an expert on corporate governance and a former professor at Harvard Business School. Dr. El-Hage led the workshop and discussed two cases and an article from Harvard Business Review. This was followed by an interactive discussion in which participants provided their opinions about handling the situations posed by the cases.

The key learning points from the cases and the discussion were as follows:

- To become a customer-centric company (vs. product-centric), the sales process should be transformed from a hard sell to a consultative sell.

- Companies can establish customer councils comprising of highly motivated and key customers, and this platform can become a source of collaborative product development; “we help customers plan their IT future, and they help us plan ours.”

- Customer-centric businesses understand their customers in great depth and thoroughly understand the value