July 22, 2025
ADIB Is Setting a New Standard In Customer Listening
For Ma’en Rateb El‑Baz, Head of Customer Experience Factory at Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank (ADIB), customer experience is a collective commitment. Such a mindset helped the bank secure a silver win at the 2025 Gulf Customer Experience Awards in the Best Use of Customer Insight & Feedback category.
While ADIB’s award-winning initiative was filled with impressive frameworks and results, it’s the human moments behind the strategy that truly tell the story.
Listening at Every Level
ADIB’s VoC360 framework draws from every customer touchpoint, including surveys, social media, complaints, call centres, mobile apps, and branches, and turns those insights into action. However, El‑Baz says the most powerful signal they’re getting it right is the validation that comes straight from customers.
“We immediately saw that our efforts were having an impact,” he says. “The ongoing feedback acknowledged the improvements we were making — not in vague terms, but very specifically. That constant loop of listening and responding showed us that we weren’t just collecting data; we were actually making people’s experiences better.”
Conversations That Go Beyond Reports
What truly sets ADIB apart is its Customer Majlis — an initiative that’s rare in the region. These in-person listening sessions bring together senior executives and hundreds of customers from across ADIB’s banking segments. The idea is simple: if you want to know what people care about, ask them face-to-face.
“We’ve hosted more than 400 customers at 18 Customer Majlis so far”, El‑Baz explains.
“What stood out was how much customers value being heard directly, in person. These sessions helped us surface issues we wouldn’t have picked up through surveys alone, and they’ve also allowed us to connect emotionally with our customers’ stories and expectations.”
It’s a reminder that even in a data-driven era, there’s no substitute for eye contact and honest conversation.
Smart Branches, Smarter Journeys
One of the best examples of insight turning into innovation came from a familiar frustration, and that is long queues in branches.
“Our VoC channels made it impossible to ignore that customers were fed up with waiting,” says El‑Baz.
Rather than tweak at the edges, ADIB redesigned its approach. “We introduced smart branches with self-service technology to speed up transactions, and we accelerated enhancements in our digital channels so people could avoid the branch altogether.”
The solution was about efficiency, respect for customers’ time and giving them more choice in how they engage.
Making Culture Match the Message
With a bright 2026 vision, one of ADIB’s biggest internal hurdles has been getting everyone, from frontline staff to senior leaders, aligned behind customer-centric thinking. El‑Baz’s approach is to show, not tell.
“When priorities and decisions clearly reflect customer impact, people take notice,” he says. “It’s not about posters or slogans. It’s about how we act. When leadership consistently makes choices that put the customer first, it filters down.”
To back that up, ADIB runs a monthly Service Council that brings together executive leadership to review customer insight data and agree on next steps, a model of governance that makes sure good ideas don’t get lost in a spreadsheet.
What’s Next: Real-Time, AI-Powered Listening
Looking ahead, ADIB is planning on AI to take its VoC360 strategy even further. The team is exploring real-time sentiment analysis, AI-driven engagement tracking, and deeper big data analytics to identify patterns that humans might miss.
“It’s not just about collecting more feedback,” El‑Baz notes. “It’s about finding meaning in it faster, and acting on it more precisely.”
A Case for Entering the Awards
For companies considering whether award submissions like the Gulf Customer Experience Awards are worth the effort, ADIB’s story makes a compelling case. Winning is only part of the experience; benchmarking your efforts against the best, sharing ideas, and showing your teams that their work has impact beyond the boardroom.
ADIB didn’t win by shouting loudest but through listening closely and turning what they heard into something real.
