Vodacom

Best customer experience

Providing an exceptional customer experience creates a meaningful and sustainable differentiation from our competitors. As part of our vision of becoming a leading digital company, our goal is to digitise the customer experience and substantially enhance the quality of service we provide, so that we lead in net promoter score in each of our markets.

Delivering the best customer service

In May 2015, we launched an ambitious three-year programme under the Vodafone global CARE initiative that focuses on four areas aimed at maximising the customer experience:

We have made progress in each of these areas over the reporting period:

Connectivity – We will be guaranteeing network satisfaction in terms of speed, reliability and coverage, and taking a proactive approach in monitoring and maintaining coverage, call and data quality.

• We are so confident about the quality of our network, in August 2016 we launched our dropped-call guarantee campaign, providing customers with free minutes if a call is dropped on the Vodacom network in South Africa.
• In line with our promise to guarantee the network performance for our customers, we proactively monitor and resolve network issues, with a priority focus on those areas where there are known detractors, high-value customers or high dropped-call rates. On resolving the issue, we send an SMS to all surrounding cells informing customers that a network problem has been picked up and resolved. Since August, more than 1.1 million customers were engaged via SMS, informing them that their issues have been resolved and service restored and they should have a better network experience.
• In November 2016, we launched our Vodacom Ready Business Assessment tool that allows enterprise customers to selfassess how their business is performing and their level of technological competitiveness, and to identify opportunities to improve. The outcome of the assessment is a Business Readiness score and a personalised report with which we are able to recommend solutions to improve their score.
• In October 2016, we launched Vodacom Business Booster to our SME market – a full feature accounting, inventory management, order, quotation, invoicing and expense management solution. The service includes a mobile app that customers can use to issue quotations and invoices from their mobile devices.

Always in control – We aim to ensure that customers have full control of their spend, and do not have any surprises from bill shock.

• Through our award-winning MyVodacom app, customers can view balances, buy bundles and manage their account, free of charge.
• We provide out-of-bundle notifications and smart recommendations for optimal in-bundle usage.
• We have extended our international roaming product, Travel Saver, to 180 countries, and we will be launching new cost-effective roaming data bundles soon.
• In December 2016, we broadened our international prepaid data-roaming footprint from 10 to 64 countries.

Rewarding loyalty – We are rewarding long-term customers, and refreshing our existing contract and prepaid loyalty programmes.

• This year, we launched various new loyalty programmes, including our Surprise & Delight programme and LifeStyle rewards aimed at the youth segment.
• Vodacom leveraged the Summer platform, Play Every Day, to launch incentives in the form of third-party lifestyle vouchers to our customers. There were over 1 billion plays and we offered more than 13 million discount vouchers, 24 000 mystery prizes, 296 grand prizes, and 98 TVs and PS4s, to the value of R8.4 million.

Easy access – We will maximise the efficiency and quality of customer support by digitising our customer experience, maintaining a segmented approach to deliver customer excellence.

• We are driving uptake of MyVodacom app as the core interaction platform, providing a personalised experience, facilitating automated diagnosis of device and network settings and ‘self-healing’. By financial year, end 2.3 million customers had downloaded the app (2016: 1.0 million).
• In keeping to our commitment to provide customers with a clear understanding of their past, present and future bills, we have launched Future Bill Summary and Bill History in the MyVodacom app. Available to both prepaid and contract customers, this aims to reduce bill shock and give customers the ability to manage their usage.
• We have launched a prioritised service for high value customers, with direct access to an agent with no queuing.
• We have launched our Enterprise Converged Portal targeted at large corporates, providing them with self-service capabilities to manage their accounts.
• We have successfully transformed 100% of our 1 000+ Customer Care staff onto a front-line operational excellence programme called Flight. We are the lead market in Vodafone for this initiative, which has driven an 8.6ppt increase in Customer Care touch-point net promoter score (TNPS) this year. The project has enhanced the customer experience and generated operational efficiencies by reducing the average handle time (AHT). Next year, we will be bringing additional system functionality and training into our front-line agents to resolve customer queries first time, every time.
• In our retentions call centre, Flight has contributed to a reduction in contract churn from 8.5% to 4.2% over the financial year. The success of the programme was extended into key retail outlets, with over 500 store managers and regional staff trained in the new model. The TNPS of our retail stores shifted over the year from 32.2 in April 2016 to 41.4 in March 2017.
• The gradual digitalisation of the Vodacom franchise stores begins in May 2017. Initially, customers will be able to do their upgrade on a tablet alongside a sales consultant, which creates a fresh and exciting user experience. Our new process is completely paperless, and early testing indicates that transaction time will be halved. Customers will also be able to start their sales journey on our website, then reserve and collect their new device at their favourite Vodacom shop. They will also be able to book an appointment at that shop to avoid any queues.

Driving a positive customer experience in our retail operations

South Africa

We have successfully delivered on our three-year retail transformation strategy, maintaining market differentiation through the quality of our end-to-end service offerings:

• We have transformed almost all of our Vodacom-branded stores to ensure alignment with our global look and feel, and to deliver an enhanced customer experience, moving from a purely transactional environment to an experiential customer experience.
• We have achieved a 10% year-on-year improvement in total NPS for retail and fully resolved 69% of customer interactions in-store on the first visit.
• We have integrated seven walk-in customer centres into ‘Superstores’, creating an optimal operating model that empowers our franchise partners to render all services under one roof at strategically positioned locations across the country.
• We are continuing to support the strategy, rollout and maintenance of the Vodacom ‘Express’ stores in emerging markets with 18 sites across the country and growing. Through our 306 dedicated TechZone areas in our franchise stores and selected independent dealers, we ensure a consistent digital experience for customers and showcasing our product and service offerings, particularly those available through Vodacom 4U and NXT LVL aimed at our tech-savvy youth market.
• We have maintained a strong focus on our leading after-sales and repair activities, driving repair avoidance and first repair resolution through our RED Box diagnostics tool. Since introducing the tool, 90% of faults have been resolved in-store, with more than 176 000 devices not needing to be sent to repair workshops. We have resolved more than 170 000 first-line technical services within 24 hours, with over 600 000 repairs processed on average within five days. We further enhanced the experience for RED customers; who received like-for-like loan phones with the same operating system in instances where their device needs to be sent to an advanced repair centre. To date, we have distributed 2 000 of these loan devices to 285 of our stores.
• We completed more than 10 000 transactions with our revolutionary Apps Loader platform, enabling customers to have their chosen apps downloaded and registered on their device before leaving the store.

International operations

We have delivered further improvements in our retail activities across our International operations, where we are focusing on getting the basics right for our ambitious CARE initiative.

• We improved our NPS position in the DRC to first from fourth place last year, maintained our lead on NPS in Lesotho, moved to second place in Mozambique and fell to third place in Tanzania.
• We have continued to rollout new store formats in all our markets, introducing RED boxes in many of our stores, and are making further investment in improving our customer call centres.
• Tanzania launched an M-Pesa app for smartphones that has unique experiences such as QR code assisted payments, easier access to contacts, predefined amounts and integrates with the merchant payment platform.
• In response to the significant customer registration requirements in Tanzania, the DRC and Mozambique, we have introduced a registration app to improve the customer experience and mitigate the significant negative impact of these requirements.
  

Vodacom recognised as top telecoms customer service provider

Vodacom was recognised as providing the best customer service in the telecoms sector, in market research organisation Ask Afrika’s Orange Index 2016/17. The annual survey, conducted since 2001, is the most comprehensive and longest running service excellence benchmark in South Africa. It provides a barometer of how companies are treating their customers compared with their competitors and across industries.