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Customer Service Fix May be Too Late for Vodafone

By Linda Dobel
TMCnet Contributor

Customers will no longer tolerate poor products and poor service. Companies are learning the hard way that when customers don’t get what they want, they complain loudly and/or take their business elsewhere.

The international telecommunications company Vodafone (News - Alert) is one of the companies that has learned this lesson. The good news is it intends to do something about it—although not fast enough for some.

It was reported in the Australian paper the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) today that after Vodafone experienced widespread network problems this early year in its Australian operations, not only was it hit with a court action from a dealer that complained it lost revenue because of those problems, but it also lost 375,000 of its broadband and mobile Australian customers in the first six months of 2011 due to network problems. Those former customers claimed the poor customer service in addition to the network issues compounded the situation.

It doesn’t end there. SMH reported that although it failed to materialize due to lack of financial recourses, over 20,000 Vodafone customers joined a class action to try to be compensated for reception and service failure.

To help reverse the situation, Vodafone announced that it will implement new call center technology that should help eliminate some of the customer frustrations with call transfers and wait times.

According to Angus Kidman writing for Australian-based Lifehacker, Vodafone is calling the solution it is implementing One Connect. It reportedly will use a Genesys-based system designed by Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) that will “monitor incoming calls across Vodafone’s phone network,” as well as monitor email messages and Tweets it receives and posts on its Facebook (News - Alert) page and online forums. As a result of this monitoring, it will “route the enquiry to the best place and to the customer service advisor with the best skills to respond,” the company reportedly said in a statement.

Since one of the common complaints about Vodafone was that its agents were not knowledgeable, Lee Challoner-Miles, who heads up Vodafone contact center systems and telephony, reportedly told SMH that the new technology will route call more quickly to agents who are specialists in the area of the complaint.      

Also commenting on the new system, Vodafone’s director of customer service and experience, Cormac Hodgkinson, was quoted in SMH as saying, ‘‘Vodafone One Connect is incredibly advanced. It intelligently reviews each enquiry to make sure customers reach the right customer service advisor.’’

The system should be operational by March 2012, which some of the readers of Angus Kidman said is too late.

In other news, TMCnet reported, “ORBCOMM (News - Alert) will work with Vodafone, who will supply GSM connectivity and its M2M platform, to pursue further opportunities to deliver dual-mode services and help customers worldwide enable their M2M-based solutions.”