Summary
The article argues that listening to pilgrims should move beyond collecting social media replies into a disciplined voice-of-beneficiary system that improves Hajj services. It emphasizes understanding pilgrim personas, combining multiple feedback channels, using AI to classify and analyze comments, converting priorities such as mobility, food waste, and heat into improvement projects, measuring impact through operational indicators, and closing the loop by showing pilgrims how their voices shaped better services for future seasons.
From Listening to Service Improvement
As is customary for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, its leadership and people, in sparing no effort to ease the journey of the Guests of the Most Merciful (Duyuf al-Rahman) and bring them the means of comfort and tranquility, so that they may enjoy a faith-filled journey that fulfils what they had hoped for; and in keeping with the practice of the leadership in listening to the voice of citizens, residents, and Guests of the Most Merciful and understanding their needs, His Excellency Dr. Tawfiq Al-Rabiah, Minister of Hajj and Umrah, invited the pilgrims of Hajj season 1447 to submit ideas and proposals that would contribute to developing the next Hajj season, 1448.
The invitation has received 2,092 replies and around 952,000 views. The number itself is not striking when measured against the large number of pilgrims in the season, nor is it the achievement. The achievement begins after the last reply, when the practical question is asked: what do we do with all these views so that we can turn them into better services next season?
This is where the work of the beneficiary-experience specialist begins. It separates those who see the replies as noise that ends when the interaction ends from those who see them, as His Excellency does, as a data source that can guide development decisions. This reflects the core logic of voice-of-customer work: customer or beneficiary needs should be captured and then translated into design, operational, and improvement decisions (Griffin and Hauser, 1993).
Whom Do We Serve Before We Listen?
Before any organization gathers feedback, it needs to understand who it serves. Listening does not begin with the platform; it begins with a clear understanding of the beneficiary and the definition of beneficiary personas.
What His Excellency did is an example of what every organization serving beneficiaries, especially the Guests of the Most Merciful, should do, whether it is a government entity, a private-sector organization, or a non-profit. Each should build an integrated voice-of-beneficiary program. But before collecting anything, the organization should know who it serves.
In this case, relevant personas include:
| Persona | Distinct needs in the Hajj journey |
| The pilgrim arriving from abroad | Language, reception, orientation, mobility, accommodation, and journey coordination |
| The domestic pilgrim | Packages, permits, quotas, pricing, and access |
| The elderly pilgrim | Lower physical effort, crowd protection, shade, rest points, and prioritized support |
| The pilgrim with a disability | Accessibility, assisted mobility, clearer routing, and field support |
Each person has goals, expectations, and needs that differ from the others. Whoever is not understood cannot be served with a suitable experience, nor can their voice be properly heard. Persona-based design is useful because it helps teams design for specific user goals and contexts rather than for an abstract “average” user (Cooper, 1999).
On this understanding, a voice-of-beneficiary program should not rely on one channel alone. X is only one listening channel, alongside surveys, interviews, field-service channels, and complaints. Each channel reveals what others may conceal. A Hajj-serving organization reaches maturity when it brings these channels together into one program that listens to all beneficiaries, not only to those whose voices happen to be heard.
How Do We Analyze and Organize?
The first channel to examine in this example is the one that generated immediate interaction: replies on X. In their raw form, these replies are scattered material, containing thousands of mixed ideas that cannot produce organized insight until they are classified.
Here, AI-enabled analysis tools can play a role. They can analyze thousands of responses quickly, classify them by topic, and assess their tone, reducing days of traditional manual work and revealing a clearer picture of pilgrims’ priorities. Sentiment and opinion-mining methods are concerned with the computational treatment of opinions, sentiment, and subjectivity in text, which makes them relevant to large-scale feedback analysis (Pang and Lee, 2008).
The ideas received show that around 85% of the replies expressed thanks and appreciation for the major efforts made to serve the Guest of the Most Merciful. They also showed understanding of the natural challenges of such an exceptional season, with its time and geographic constraints. The replies suggest that pilgrims praised what had improved before proposing what they wanted next, addressing the organizations working in the Hajj ecosystem as partners in development rather than as dissatisfied complainants.
When the topics of these ideas are analyzed, the pattern is as follows:
| Priority area | Approximate share of the most-engaged replies | Main issues raised |
| Mobility and crowding | 28% | Movement, congestion, and the difficulty of dispersal |
| Domestic pilgrims and Makkah residents | 23% | Packages, permits, quotas, and access |
| Preserving food and preventing waste in open buffets | 17% | Food-use discipline and responsible consumption |
| Heat and lack of shade | 14% | Exposure to the sun, shade, and thermal comfort |
| Cleanliness, sustainability, the elderly, and people with disabilities | Not specified | Operational quality, inclusion, and support services |
One priority may weigh more heavily on one segment than another. Crowding during dispersal is more difficult for elderly pilgrims and pilgrims with disabilities. High package prices are more directly felt by domestic pilgrims. For this reason, the numbers should be read through the personas, not as one average that treats all beneficiaries as the same. This is consistent with the broader view that customer experience should be understood across journeys, touchpoints, and differing user contexts rather than through a single undifferentiated measure (Lemon and Verhoef, 2016).
What Do the Numbers Not Tell Us?
Before decisions are made on these numbers, we must ask who wrote the replies. The participants are a specific subset of pilgrims: they write in Arabic, follow the minister’s account, and are inclined to express their opinions online.
Missing from this channel is most pilgrims in the season, around 1.7 million pilgrims, most of whom came from outside the Kingdom. The invitation may not have reached them in their own languages, and they did not write replies. Official statistics reported 1,707,301 pilgrims for Hajj 2026 / 1447 AH, including 1,546,655 international pilgrims and 160,646 domestic pilgrims (General Authority for Statistics, 2026).
If development priorities are arranged only according to the voices of those who speak, the decision will be made from the view of a minority, while the needs of the silent majority may be lost. This is where the value of a multi-channel voice-of-beneficiary program becomes clear. It does not stop at those who volunteered to write; it deliberately reaches the silent groups through suitable channels and in their languages.
Such a program may include:
- A representative survey covering all nationalities.
- Field-service channels that meet the Guest of the Most Merciful where they are.
- Interviews with specific segments such as elderly pilgrims, pilgrims with disabilities, and domestic pilgrims.
- Complaint channels and service-center data.
- Social media feedback as one channel among several.
A single channel may provide rich insight, reveal details, and open important questions. But it cannot replace the other channels.
How Do We Move from Report to Decision?
Analyzing the voice of the beneficiary and producing a report is not the end of the work; it is the beginning. A report placed in a drawer does not change the experience of a single pilgrim.
Value begins when the first three priorities, mobility, food, and heat, are turned into defined development projects. Each project should have an owner, timeline, and budget. Each should begin with a small-scale pilot before being generalized across the whole season. This is the difference between an organization that gathers opinions so it can say it listened and an organization that translates opinions into an action plan visible to the Guest of the Most Merciful in their route, camp, and meal.
A practical conversion path could be represented as follows:
This translation of voice into action is aligned with the idea that beneficiary input should be deployed across organizational functions rather than kept as isolated feedback (Griffin and Hauser, 1993).
How Do We Measure Improvement?
The next step is to prove that development has succeeded. Saying that the Guests of the Most Merciful have become “more satisfied” is a general statement that cannot be properly measured. Satisfaction alone is also insufficient in a journey such as Hajj, where beneficiaries and their personas are diverse.
It is more useful to develop composite indicators designed around the nature of the journey. These indicators should measure impressions, outcomes, and effort. Comparing these numbers before and after development reveals whether the service has truly improved, by how much, and where the problem remains.
Possible measurement dimensions include:
| Measurement dimension | What it captures | Example application in the Hajj journey |
| Impression | How the pilgrim felt about the experience | Perceived safety, comfort, clarity, and dignity |
| Outcome | Whether the service achieved its purpose | Successful movement, timely access, adequate food, usable facilities |
| Effort | How much physical or procedural burden the pilgrim faced | Walking distance, waiting time, number of steps, need to ask for help |
| Segment equity | Whether improvement reached different personas | Elderly pilgrims, people with disabilities, domestic pilgrims, and international pilgrims |
Service-quality measurement has long emphasized that perceived service quality can be assessed through structured instruments rather than general impressions alone (Parasuraman et al., 1988). Likewise, loyalty and recommendation measures such as the Net Promoter logic, and effort-based measures such as customer effort, show why organizations often need more than a broad satisfaction score when assessing experience (Reichheld, 2003; Dixon et al., 2010).
In this way, measuring the experience of the Guest of the Most Merciful moves from a general impression that changes with circumstances to stable operational indicators that can be tracked season after season. The decision-maker can then see where the fruit of their effort has been realized and where effort should be doubled.
How Do We Close the Loop With the Beneficiary?
A final step is often forgotten: the answer must be returned to the person who gave the opinion. A Guest of the Most Merciful who proposed an idea that was adopted deserves to know that the suggestion became a service.
Even if that person will most likely not be a pilgrim again, they carry the memory of their journey and tell it to those around them. Their satisfaction becomes reputation, and their experience becomes a story that is retold.
The loop also has a wider face. In addition to responding to the person who made the proposal, the organization should announce to the Guests of the Most Merciful and to the public what changed because of their voices. This extends trust to those who did not write and reassures the silent majority that their voice is heard even when they do not directly express it. Complaint-handling and feedback systems are strongest when they are designed not only to receive input, but also to support improvement and follow-through (ISO, 2018).
When the invitation is repeated every year, it reaches new pilgrims. When it is accompanied by measurements showing that the problems of the previous season have declined, listening becomes more than a seasonal gesture that rises and fades. It becomes a continuous development system that builds each season on the one before it.
Implications for Hajj Service Providers
The value of what His Excellency Dr. Tawfiq did will not be measured by views. Those numbers pass. It will be measured by the difference that the Guest of the Most Merciful feels next season in movement, food, and time under the sun.
Listening tools are now available to everyone. The difference is made by those who possess the method: the method that turns opinion into decision, measures the effect of that decision in numbers, and returns the impact to those who spoke.
What His Excellency did is an open invitation to every organization working in the service of the Guest of the Most Merciful to make the beneficiary’s voice the basis of its decisions, not a margin. This applies especially to companies serving domestic and international pilgrims. They are closest to the pilgrim and closest to the details of the journey: issuing the permit, choosing the package, reception, movement, accommodation, overnight stay, and departure.
These companies can build, for every segment of their pilgrims, a multi-channel voice-of-beneficiary program that listens to them in their languages, analyses their observations, converts their priorities into development projects, measures those projects with numbers, and returns the impact to them. The service provider that master’s listening to its pilgrim today earns a reputation that precedes it among the pilgrims of coming seasons. It turns every season into an uninterrupted journey of development, built on the principle that the pilgrim’s voice is a trust transformed into service.
Closing
The article’s central insight is that listening is not a public interaction metric; it is an operating discipline. The replies to a ministerial invitation are valuable not because they are numerous, but because they can become a structured voice-of-beneficiary system: persona-aware, multi-channel, analytically classified, converted into projects, measured through operational indicators, and closed through visible communication with pilgrims. For Hajj service providers, the practical implication is clear: the organizations that build disciplined listening systems today will improve next season’s journey and strengthen trust for the seasons that follow.
References
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