When the coronavirus pandemic escalated in 2020, telecom operators were under pressure to keep people, businesses, government and health services connected while pivoting to remote working and protecting their own employees, many of whom were essential frontline workers. For Saudi Telecom Company (STC), the largest operator in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the pandemic raised many challenges that threatened to impact sales, customer service and its brand. National lockdown measures meant that STC had to close its retail shops, which blocked its primary sales and service channel and hindered brand engagement with customers and local communities. The operator needed new ways to strengthen brand loyalty and serve its geographically dispersed and culturally unique customer base. In partnership with Huawei, STC launched a major digital customer experience transformation program, called Corporate Customer Experience Management (CCEx), which began in 2019 and created the foundation for improving digital customer experience. At the heart of CCEx is Huawei’s SmartCare platform, comprising customer experience management, network performance management and service quality management. Previously, each of STC’s consumer, enterprise and wholesale business units operated in silos and in inconsistent ways. The operator wanted standard definitions and metrics across the units and a holistic customer view. Working with Huawei, STC established a unified model for the customer lifecycle and certified some 178 customer journeys across all touchpoints, based on TM Forum’s Lifecycle Metrics standard. Based on a myriad of customer metrics across three areas, broadly defined as “engaging”, “using”, and “evaluating”, Huawei developed a Customer Experience Index (CEI) along with a dashboard to monitor changes and analytics to understand customer perception and business outcomes and then recommend actions. At the end of 2020, despite all the pandemic-related challenges, STC excelled at improving digital customer experience and exceeded CEI targets in all three business units. STC also introduced novel ways to connect with customers through a new Digital Community (DC), which brings together customers and employees to share tips and experiences as well as crowdsource troubleshooting. The new initiative not only improved customer experience and satisfaction but also instilled a more customer-centric ethos among employees and the whole culture of STC Group. Huawei’s SmartCare platform is designed to adapt to rapid changes in customer experience and the customer journeys were enhanced to reflect the “new normal”. This capability enables STC to deliver relevant services, which was critical when the pandemic changed so much for consumers and businesses.