Pioneering Customer Experience Transformation In Saudi Arabia’S Ministry Of Human Resources And Social Development

The Human Resources and Social Development Ministry (HRSD) was one of the largest and most important ministries in Saudi Arabia, with 22,000 employees serving more than 30 million customers and beneficiaries. The ministry consisted of four sectors – labor which served and regulated the private and non-profit sectors; civil service which served government entities and employees; social development which served disadvantaged groups; and shared services which served the three customer-facing sectors. The three customer-facing sectors had been separate ministries until they were merged, and still operated mostly in silos. A new minister appointed in 2018 determined that the ministry had to be transformed to allow it to play its part in meeting Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 roles. He brought in Mohammed Al Jasser in 2019 as Assistant Minister for Shared Services to spearhead the transformation. Customer experience (CX) transformation was a key part of this. The case describes the initial phase of the ministry’s CX transformation. It included creating a CX deputyship, putting CX strategy and governance in place, and carrying out pilot projects to address immediate problems and build support within the organization. The next phase of the CX transformation would be scaling up and implementing it across the ministry. The case discusses the challenges the ministry will face in this phase, including initiative fatigue, limited interest in improving CX, policy changes not aligned with CX, and fragmented service ownership. The case ends by mentioning two important issues for a successful CX transformation: Ensuring that the outsourcing of customer-facing activities, which was happening in parallel, supported this; and engineering a mindset and cultural shift among ministry officials. Although the first phase of the CX transformation had been successful, scaling up across the ministry would be challenging. How should Al Jasser and his team proceed to achieve this objective?