How Dubai Police creates happier and safer citizens

The Dubai Police force has long been viewed as one of the most progressive in the Arab world when it comes to technology. It was among the first to use DNA testing in criminal investigations, one of the first to use electronic fingerprinting, and one of the first police forces to go paperless. With forward-thinking leaders, like Major Khalid Al Marri, Director of Social Media Section, Security Media Department, Dubai Police, the force opted in 2020 to partner with Sprinklr in order to better serve the nearly three million residents in its jurisdiction.

“Everything now goes through Sprinklr,” Major Khalid Al Marri says. “It makes it easy to manage my team.”

To understand how and why the Dubai Police use Sprinklr, it’s important to have some context: Dubai Police is an incredibly innovative, digitally-connected organization. It provides 80 different services to the public and runs online marketing campaigns to drive awareness around these services. It also provides online customer services to its constituents for everything from general inquiries to road traffic concerns to electronic crime — with nearly 100% of its customer service agents using Sprinklr. If you get in a minor car accident in Dubai, you’re instructed not to call the police station, but to upload photos and details to the police app. And if you need to file a labor complaint or pay a traffic fine, you might do so at one of Dubai’s 24/7 self-service Smart Police Station (SPS).

In 2020, Major Khalid Al Marri was looking for a technology solution that would help drive awareness campaigns for services provided by police, track the impact of these campaigns and general sentiment around them, monitor the city for safety concerns, and provide excellent customer service across social channels.

Major Khalid Al Marri’s primary objectives were to:

• Enable the social media team to work together on a common platform to plan, publish, and manage content, then measure and efficiently respond to customer engagement.
• Listen to the real-time voice of constituents and to important topics across social and digital channels in order to surface actionable insights to appropriate departments.
• Provide digital-first, proactive, and expedient customer service to Dubai residents.

The social media team now works from a common platform to plan and publish content in support of Dubai Police social campaigns that help drive awareness for its public services. As part of these campaigns, the team may share on social channels any important news, press releases, or public service announcements. Topics of their posts range from online crime to the various ways in which Dubai residents can use the innovative SPSs . In a recent Facebook post, for example, Dubai Police reminded residents to use its “Police Eye”community-policing service to anonymously report traffic violations and suspicious activities; on Instagram, they also let residents know that their Smart Lost & Found system had helped return more than 80,000 items to their owners.

“A big gain for us here has been the ability to publish on all social channels,” says Major Khalid Al Marri, whose team used three different software applications prior to implementing the social media automation platform from Sprinklr Social.

This team also leverages social listening capabilities and sentiment analysis from Sprinklr Insights. Dubai Police has implemented a robust listening framework, which allows it to accomplish two things:

• Listen to the real-time voices of its customers to understand the impact of its marketing and awareness campaigns — and adjust them accordingly.
• Listen to important topics and themes relevant to Dubai Police and residents in order to detect and mitigate any potential crises. For example, it monitors keywords related to big events or online conversations around a type of organized crime, like money laundering, or related to particular locations, like the airport.
  

“It’s incredibly powerful to use real-time data and alerting to gather the information we need to tackle crime and keep our citizens safe and informed,” says Major Khalid Al Marri. “With Sprinklr’s AI-powered listening products, we now have the ability to identify and prevent hundreds of potentially criminal activities that could have otherwise gone undetected. It’s as if Dubai police force has eyes and ears in all the digital channels we need to be in.”

Finally, Dubai Police implemented Sprinklr Service for its customer service needs. Agents located around the city work in shifts, logging in to Sprinklr’s mobile app to field inquiries from Dubai residents, which come in through Facebook, Instagram, X, formerly Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Sprinklr Service automatically assigns these messages to customer service agents, who manage them from a unified care console. A Microsoft Dynamics integration allows agents to escalate high-priority cases, like drug or other worrying crime reports, to relevant internal departments for further investigation.