Customer, Capability and Consistency

After a lifetime career story in Retail and Customer Experience in Vodafone UK (with some pretty fabulous chapters), around 3 years ago I made the short hop from Newbury to Paddington and a giant leap into Vodafone Group to embark on a truly amazing adventure. This is the story of that adventure and how we tackled three C’s: Customer, Capability and Consistency.

The need for change ….

At Vodafone we have found ourselves both challenged and inspired by major shifts in  customer perceptions and expectations. In our industry we found that we were not regarded to be any better than our competitors. The entire Telecoms market has changed beyond recognition with converged services such as broadband and TV being offered in most countries and by many companies and technology changing the way we interact constantly. Customers have far more choice and, quite rightly so, are demanding more from all of their service providers, and using the very products and services we provide to do so!

So, in 2015 Vodafone launched the Customer Experience Excellence programme (CXX), a global initiative driven by our Executive Committee to ensure we deliver the best-in-class experience to our customers in all our markets. A big part of how we deliver this rests on the behaviours of our frontline teams. But … so what? This is not a new story, every company wants to differentiate on service. So, before you tune out… what is different here? 

The size, scope and complexity of what Vodafone have done is huge, historic and unprecedented not just for Vodafone, but also for many industries. Imagine our 110,000 frontline employees in stores and contact centres, handling over a billion customer enquiries per year from individual consumers to large multi-national corporations, across 21 different countries and factor in that 85% of these employees don’t even work for Vodafone, they work for one of our outsourced contact centre partners or a franchisee store owner. This makes it one of the largest programmes of its kind in Vodafone’s history. To deliver one consistent, unrivalled customer experience through such a diverse audience is no mean feat, our ambition to ensure our customers get their query resolved first time, and that our employees consistently play from a 10!

To achieve our vision, we need to deliver on our customers’ expectations both practically and emotionally, to deliver an experience where queries are resolved first time, and relationships are built, leading to happier customers and fewer repeat contacts.

Building the Transformation

To achieve this, the CXX task force, from HR; OE, Resourcing, L&D and also Customer Operations and Retail, sprang into action identifying which frontline roles will be pivotal and the critical roles chosen at this first foundation level were the Advisers and Managers in Contact Centres and Stores. We embarked on significant research into the critical behaviors that create the greatest customer experience and most successful teams. We used both customer and employee research to identify the core behaviours desired. From 1000s of customer interactions and extensive interviews and assessment with our teams, Empathy and Ownership for solving the customers’ problem emerged for Advisers, with the addition of Coaching for Managers. These behaviours becoming ever more critical in our ever evolving digital world.

Recruitment, Assessment, Reward and the launch of a people survey covering for the first time our outsourced employees were all part of the journey, but this story is all about the learning and development!

Training Programme

It’s been emotional! The Training Programme, titled Vodafone Way of Customer CARE has been designed to establish an emotional connection between Vodafone and their in-house and out-sourced Retail and Contact Centre teams, and also between those vitally important teams and our customers.

Research has proven that use of smartphones impacts dopamine production and we are becoming addicted to seeking out information and reward through our phones and social media (Source: Psychology Today). Are you, or anyone you know “addicted” to your mobile? Add to that, your home broadband, your TV provision or the very means in which your business communicates with your clients and the emotional stakes regarding our services are higher now than ever for our customers. Understanding the vital role we play in our customers’ lives, and being able to empathise with those customers, and to identify and resolve their issues or needs quickly is essential.

In order to drive consistency of that customer experience we have introduced a Customer Experience Cycle as a framework to every interaction from Mumbai to Madrid, from store to social media, advisers use the same structure and are coached on their use of the cycle by their Manager.Vodafone Way of Customer care is a 90 day programme with a mix of online, classroom and on the job training where upon completion ‘graduates’ receive an Accreditation. This is designed to be rolled out to all existing employees and also put into a structured Induction for new starters that we have designed for both Retail and Customer Operations. To ensure there is ongoing development there are tools to embed the learning that extend way beyond the initial 90 days.

The programme has been implemented via global TTT events to share the core content and certify a core team of nearly 300 trainers globally to deliver the classroom element of the Accreditation.

We are sustaining and embedding the learning digitally with an innovative app to drive the key behaviors through observation, coaching, bitesize learning games and modules, videos and gamification. And we also have a fantastic new eGame which takes our employees [ through different customer scenarios including a Diversity Lounge which brings to life customer issues relating to LGBT+, Age, Gender and Cultural Background.

Our Training has now been rolled out to over 69,000 people! So 69,000 people know first hand what our vision for Customer Experience Excellence is, they all identify with one consistent framework to support their customer interactions and their capability in delivering Ownership and Empathy has been increased through some innovative exercises, tools and Coaching.

We have seen an increase in first contact resolution and TNPS in many of our markets and many other KPIs have also been positively impacted including revenue, attrition and employee engagement. The training is hugely popular amongst our HR, L&D teams who love delivering it, and also, of course our frontline.

What this article cannot show fully is the fun, humour and life changing stories this programme has generated. From engaging, innovative tools, singing, dancing and tears of real pride on the training, it continues to be an amazing adventure. Massive thanks to everyone who has been part of the design, training, implementation and supported all of us along the way!

Have we achieved our 3 C's? Well this is the first stage in an ever evolving journey driving customer experience through our frontline and also advancements in technology. We have laid a great foundation to build on with our future learning.

The future is exciting... Ready?