From a bank’s first contact center to the customer-experience backbone of the Saudi exchange, the quiet infrastructure of getting it right.
On a major IPO day, the Saudi exchange does not get a quiet hour. Tens of thousands of people hit the app, the channels, and the service lines at once, all on the same morning, all expecting it to work. It does. Nobody calls that a triumph, because nobody notices it at all. That invisible calm is the product Sami Ahmed Babkeer has spent his career building.
He is the Customer Experience and Integration Senior Head at Saudi Tadawul Group, and his specialty is one few people stop to name: the machinery that makes a large institution feel simple to the person on the other end. The desk you reach when something breaks is the visible part. His work sits upstream of it, in the system that keeps things from breaking in the first place.
He has done it from scratch more than once, across industries that share almost nothing. As a founding team member at Alinma Bank, he built the contact center from an empty room; it won the Middle East Best Contact Center Technology Platform Award. He built the Tadawul contact center, which won Best New Call Center. At the National Water Company he led the digital E-Branch and earned regional recognition for its government call center. At Tatweer he architected a contact center built for the complexity of national transport logistics. Finance, capital markets, utilities, transit. Same discipline, rebuilt for each new world.
Then came the hardest version of the work. As the Saudi Stock Exchange restructured into the Saudi Tadawul Group, four separate entities had to come under one customer-experience framework: the Exchange, Edaa, Muqassa, and Wamid, each with its own systems and its own way of doing things. Babkeer led that integration. He stood up the Group’s Customer Integration Unit, launched a centralized CRM, and rolled out the customer app, all while keeping the channels stable through the high-pressure days when a new listing went live.
The unglamorous part is what holds it together. As acting Senior Head of Shared Services, he wrote the SLA and OLA frameworks, the agreements that decide who answers what, how fast, and to what standard. It is governance work, the kind nobody puts on a poster, and it is the difference between a system that scales and one that falls apart under load.
He is not only a builder of operations. Years earlier, as Takaful manager at Tawuniya, he grew the life insurance portfolio 311% in a single year, proof that the same person who obsesses over service governance can move a revenue number hard when the job calls for it.
What ties it together is the value he places on the work. Customer service is easy to treat as a cost to be contained, a department judged by how cheaply it runs. He built his career on a different reading of it: the place where an institution earns trust or loses it, one interaction at a time, and worth building with the same care as anything core to the business. Vision 2030 has since made that view ordinary across Saudi institutions. He arrived at it twenty years early.
The exchange will have another big day soon, and the calm will hold again. Most people will never know who built the quiet. That has always been the point.
