Vodafone : UK’s customer service awards highlight the progress we’ve made

By Neil Blagden| Customer Service & Operations Director at Vodafone UK

This week, Vodafone UK won two major customer service awards - both our Social Media and Web Chat teams bagged the Silver at the UK National Contact Centre Awards. I'm incredibly proud of what our teams have achieved, and I'm keen to keep building on the progress we've made so far.

I'll be upfront here - we've come a long way. When we began upgrading our billing systems in late 2013 we failed to catch multiple problems, and when our customers called to tell us about these issues, we didn't provide the service we should have. It's taken some time to fix what went wrong, but we're continuing to improve, and we're working hard to regain our customers' trust.

Indeed, since joining Vodafone UK almost two years ago, improving customer service has been my top priority. My team and I have been listening to what our customers have to say, and whenever there's a problem, we aim to solve it as quickly and efficiently as we can. We know it's frustrating when it takes a long time to reach a call centre agent, for example. And we realise how annoying it is when there's an error on a bill.

The good news is we're moving in the right direction. Here are some key stats to illustrate what I mean. These days, if a customer phones our call centres, the average amount of time they wait to connect with a live customer service agent is around 14 seconds, an improvement of 96% since January 2016. We're also cutting down on billing errors - the number of people whose bills need crediting because of an error is down by 90%.

The changes we've made have reduced the volume of calls our service centres receive by an average of 1.1 million per month, a drop of 40%. What's more, our Pay monthly customer care Net Promoter Score - which tells us how many more customers would recommend us to a friend versus those who wouldn't - is a much improved 25%, an increase of 58 percentage points. And in March, we started recruiting 2,100 more call centre staff in the UK, so that it's even easier for customers who ring us to speak to a person.

Improving Vodafone's network performance

Whilst we know there's more work to be done, we're headed the right way. And by the end of this summer, we're confident we'll be back on track. To ensure that we are, we're also working to improve our network performance. We will have spent more than £2 billion on our network and services in the UK since the beginning of 2014, and we expect to invest another £2 billion in the next three years.

Our investment is starting to pay off - our call setup success rate is now 99.87%, and our 4G coverage has reached 96%, up from 84% a year ago. We're also rated the #1 carrier for voice and data in London, and #1 for voice in the UK, according to independent consultants P3. We're doing everything we can to improve, because we're absolutely determined to be the best mobile service provider in the market.

Reaching a key customer service milestone

The Contact Centre awards we received are an encouraging sign that we're turning things around. It's especially encouraging that these awards take into account our performance in areas like improving customer experience, and raising standards in the contact centre industry. And it's a great honour that a panel of contact centre experts recognised our teams. Reaching this point is an important milestone for my team, and for Vodafone UK.

When I first started this job in August 2015, many of the emails I received from customers were complaints, but now I also hear from people who've had a good experience with Vodafone. I'm grateful, because it helps to know what we're doing right as well as wrong. We're committed to delivering the best possible service, and that's why we always encourage customers to get in touch to tell us how we're doing. Thanks to the feedback we receive, we can continue to make great strides.

About Vodafone UK

Vodafone is one of the world's largest telecommunications companies and provides a range of services including voice, messaging, data and fixed communications. Vodafone has mobile operations in 26 countries, partners with mobile networks in 49 more, and fixed broadband operations in 17 markets. As of 30 September 2016, Vodafone had 470 million mobile customers and 14 million fixed broadband customers. For more information, please visit: www.vodafone.com.

Vodafone UK partners with businesses of all sizes - from start-ups and small businesses to the largest corporates and the public sector. The company has worked with UK businesses for over 30 years, starting out as a mobile provider and becoming one of the UK's leading total communications partners. It provides a range of voice and data services, secure communications infrastructure, fixed and call centre capability, unified communications and was the first mobile phone operator to offer a truly converged service for fixed and mobile.

Vodafone is currently spending around £1 billion on its network and services across the UK following a similar amount spent last year. This includes £200 million on its network in London, the introduction of its 4G service to more than 928 cities and towns, as well as thousands of smaller communities whilst also making network improvements across its UK 3G network. Meanwhile, The Vodafone Rural Open Sure Signal programme is also aiming to bring 3G coverage for the first time to 100 remote communities across the UK.

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