Vodafone on Fairgo, claim to have spoken to womans husband post-mortem.

Forums › One New Zealand (including Vodafone, WxC, Farmside) › Vodafone on Fairgo, claim to have spoken to womans husband post-mortem.

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#2290857 6-Aug-2019 12:10

floydbloke:

we settle on:

fix the contact centre's attitude and approach from its current to one of being customer-centric and focussed on resolving the customer's query/request.
😃

Could cut and dice it any way you wish really.

The very quick little bit of detail you provided pointed to the problem your keen to see solved rather than the face value issue though.

It's something that i'm sure @JasonParis would be able to take in and actually use rather than "get rid of offshore" (not to say your feedback wasn't on point, it just needed teasing out is all)

It's also learnings other providers can pick at from too - Offshore callcenters aren't unique to the big providers afterall :)

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Any comments made are personal opinion and do not reflect directly on the position my current or past employers may have.

WyleECoyoteNZ

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#2290861 6-Aug-2019 12:16

floydbloke:

hio77:

floydbloke:

Agree with the above sentiments. In my view VF NZ needs to do the following:

bring the contact centre back in house, in NZ

The one thing i have never understood about this argument is simply the why?

Obviously Vodafone use different offshore resources to Spark, but having spent a fair bit of time with ours over my time here. I'd have to say they are identical to onshore.

It's the processes and support models setup around them that make the difference.

Fair point. I guess it's perception.

I've not had to ring them of late but certainly a few years ago, when I believe it was Phillipines based, the sound quality was just atrocious and we had trouble understanding each other. Frustration sets in quickly.

Recently, from speaking to people around me who are suffering poor VF service, is the feeling of being fobbed off. Agents simply give assurances to try and finish the call and there is no follow through, no acknowledging emails, no records kept (evident by having to repeat yourself next time you call). This could be symptomatic of poor process and wrong KPIs. However, I can't help but feel, and I don't think I'm alone in this, that this would be nowhere near as bad if customer talked to agents who are close to the rest of the VFNZ organisation and have subscribed to the newly fixed customer-friendly culture.

I'd guess the reason behind VF's offshore call centre is cost. In any organisation, one of the organisations biggest operational costs will be the salary\wage costs.

I don't have the information of what Vodafone pay their employee in call centres off shore, but it would be safe to suggest it's not the NZ minimum wage ($17.70 per hour)

Having a NZ based call centre would be great, but i'd expect that the costs are more here having to staff a call centre 24/7 365 days paying NZ's minimum wage.

richms

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#2290918 6-Aug-2019 13:35

hio77:

The one thing i have never understood about this argument is simply the why?

Obviously Vodafone use different offshore resources to Spark, but having spent a fair bit of time with ours over my time here. I'd have to say they are identical to onshore.

It's the processes and support models setup around them that make the difference.

Because customers are racist, want top tier service on their bargain priced service and dont understand that businesses cant afford to lose all that money on every call to get help when most are customer induced idiocy.

Richard rich.ms

floydbloke

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#2290939 6-Aug-2019 13:57

richms:

...

Because customers are racist, want top tier service on their bargain priced service and dont understand that businesses cant afford to lose all that money on every call to get help when most are customer induced idiocy.

I disagree, and find your post quite derogatory.

The contact centre (i.e. the front-line service) of Vodafone has been well below the standard of what people can expect. They pay for a service. When it breaks it’s not unreasonable to speak to a person who is willing to listen and understand what the problem is, and then arrange to have it resolved within a day or two (in most cases). Similarly if someone requests a change in their service, that they are prepared to pay for, it is not unreasonable to expect to speak to someone who can advise them on their options and then see to it that the request is fulfilled to the extent that was promised.

The fact is that on many occasions the VF contact centre agents tell untruths, don’t fulfil promises, don’t keep accurate records and I know of several occasions where they have actually made situations worse (by causing disconnections).

As I mentioned above, a wideheld perception (rightly or wrongly) is that the contact-centre being offshore is a contributing factor to this ‘mess’. This does not make most customers racist, nor does it make them idiots.

Did Eric Clapton really think she looked wonderful...or was it after the 15th outfit she tried on and he just wanted to get to the party and get a drink?

Stu1

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#2291025 6-Aug-2019 16:06

BlinkyBill: Vodafone are transitioning out some poor performing offshore call centre suppliers, to better quality offshore call centre providers. This in a bid to improve the customer experience.

The new one is just as bad I actually found the Philippines better than the new Indian crew. Nothing beats a NZ call center they have empathy and can relate to NZ needs e.g know what landline is and what an area code is.

antoniosk

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#2291076 6-Aug-2019 17:20

I’ve put @floydbloke suggestion in a slightly different order:

1. consolidate, or at least integrate, billing, provisioning and fault management systems/platforms
2. review processes, procedures and agent's scripts in parallel
3. stop treating the customer as though they're all dunces.
4. bring the contact centre back in house, in NZ

We all know Voda is an assemblage of acquisitions and takeovers which were poorly integrated or in many cases never integrated, making do with a TON of manual processes, emails, phone calls and so on. That’s no way to run a huge business effectively.

It doesn’t matter where the call centre is in this model. If the middleware that ties orders with delivery doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work everywhere they are. All you get from a NZ call centre is the goodwill of someone in the building to run around and ‘edit the backend’. Which then perpetuates the cycle of bad system data again. Again, no way to run a huge business. Can you imagine chorus once all the copper is replaced with fibre operating on human processes for everything again? Welcome back the NZ General Post Office,

Contact centres, for those of us whose job has been to support/improve/work with, work best with reliable systems that just need the operator to push an (onscreen) button, and TRUST everything downstream works. I always admired 2degrees middleware for that, even though I knew from folks behind the scenes it was a mess at times... broadly it was a good approach.

Unfortunately, gold stars don’t tend to get given to managers for spending a ton of money on beautiful systems tools and helping their staff be effective. You just look like you’re gold plating for no benefit, surely the humans can cope? Oh right... refer back to perpetuating bad system data...

All that’s then left is getting people who care and managers who are incented to achieve for the customer and not just the bottom line.

Anyway... I’m sure the new brooms for Vodatil will invest in the above.

Right?

________

Antoniosk

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#2291273 6-Aug-2019 23:03

Part of my opinion is that customers often don't care where the call centre is based, as long as they can hear you, understand you and (this is the big one) do what they say they are going to do. Ask for a callback, and you'll get it. Ask to get a billing error fixed, and it's done. Ask to make a change to a product, it's done. Not, "oh very sorry Sir, I apologise Sir, we will get someone to call you back Sir" or "I'm sorry Sir, I can't handle that Sir, I'll send you to the right place that will fix all your problems, Sir"...only to be transferred six times (I've heard of people having this 9 times on the one call) and having to explain your story over and over and over. Next month, exact same (wrong) charge appears on your bill, and you have to call...again...and explain your situation...again...because the person you spoke to previously didn't note anything anywhere.

Having been through this myself, I'm actually scared to call Vodafone to change anything at all, as I'm too afraid the rep I talk to is going to screw something up, or order something I didn't ask for, etc etc etc.

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matisyahu

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#2291288 7-Aug-2019 01:39

floydbloke:

Agree with the above sentiments. In my view VF NZ needs to do the following:

bring the contact centre back in house, in NZ
consolidate, or at least integrate, billing, provisioning and fault management systems/platforms
review processes, procedures and agent's scripts in parallel (and stop treating the customer as though they're all dunces. if the customer has requested some sort of change to their services and a few days later things stop working it's most likely that you VF, has done something at your end, don't put the poor customer through the pain of modem resets, swapouts, etc.)
this would give staff the tools and systems to get an accurate,complete view, and will help drive the culture shift to one of taking some ownership
Wet finger in the air I reckon it would take about $20M to put this in place if you want to get it right. Jason and the new owners need to decide whether they want to invest that sort of coin in delivering quality customer service and restoring NZ's faith in the Vodafone brand...or carry on with case-by-case pain, band-aids and apologies.

Around a year ago I asked Jason Paris on Twitter when we might see a unified billing system and he replied that Vodafone was working on it. One year later and it still hasn't launched. I don't want to sound negative but assuming that it was in development a year before my twitter and it has been a year since that week thus a total of 2 years I have to ask what on earth is happening at Vodafone. So much of the problem at Vodafone could be solved by channeling people into retail stores where possible, training up retail staff with full time positions so then you can retain knowledgable staff where the focus is on customer satisfaction rather than how many units you can ram through to meet some sales target, in the call centre not having people soiled but rather cross trained, better communication to customers so that end users aren't waiting an hour on hold to be told "yes, there is an outage in your area" when it could be better communicated through SMS, twitter and a recorded message that is put up in a timely manner rather than my old employer where it took them 2 hours fo them to finally put a recoded message on the help line after call stuff endured 2 hours of abuse by customers. Oh, and how about the technology team who take care of the communicate to properly communicate to frontline staff what is happening - if the excrement has hit the fan than say so, don't promise "it'll be fixed in x time period" only to find that x amount of time the case who was promised it to be fixed comes back unhappy that it wasn't.

"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'"

insane

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#2291346 7-Aug-2019 07:44

Back when I worked for an ISP help desk, even a single average length call per year meant you made no profit off the customer.

Call deflection is the name of the game, and that's why typically so much emphasis is placed of IVR systems, automation and self-service.

They will know exactly what the major call drivers are, and therefore which types of calls need to have their average resolution time reduced or customer satisfaction increased.

Their product management team should be all over the metric and using those to invest in process, systems and training to improve. Honest truth is that no single overhaul will fix everything, but small incremental improvement will make a difference to those struggling end users.

Dratsab

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#2291352 7-Aug-2019 08:09

matisyahu: Around a year ago I asked Jason Paris on Twitter when we might see a unified billing system and he replied that Vodafone was working on it. One year later and it still hasn't launched. I don't want to sound negative but assuming that it was in development a year before my twitter and it has been a year since that week thus a total of 2 years I have to ask what on earth is happening at Vodafone.

That's a rather grand assumption to be making. Are you at all familiar with the scale of the multiple [disparate] systems involved or are you vastly underestimating just how complex they are? The vast chunk of "working on it" is going to be non-physical, i.e. scoping, documenting, reasoning, designing and deciding. Personally I wouldn't expect to see any visible signs of progress for 4-5 years from when they [actually] started working on it. And once the build process starts there'll be holdups due to "damn, we didn't think of that" moments and plenty of other delay due to mission creep.

On the whole (including CSR issues etc) There's a Herculean task in front of Jason and there'll be times when he doubts his own sanity. But as long as he can stick with what he says he's going to be doing, and as long as the board of directors retain faith in him, I believe the company will get there. Unfortunately for Vodafone customers, all this means there's still plenty of pain to come over the next few years at least.

quickymart

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#2291579 7-Aug-2019 12:04

I also have to wonder how they got to this point. Vodafone didn't always used to be this bad - neither did Telstra Clear, now I come to think about it...

floydbloke

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#2291606 7-Aug-2019 12:43

quickymart: I also have to wonder how they got to this point. Vodafone didn't always used to be this bad - neither did Telstra Clear, now I come to think about it...

Corporate greed. Non-stop cost-cutting on service delivery.

Did Eric Clapton really think she looked wonderful...or was it after the 15th outfit she tried on and he just wanted to get to the party and get a drink?

xpd

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#2291612 7-Aug-2019 13:01

Vodafone had their own system, then added IHUG, and how many others now ? Its a big job trying to merge or at least get them all to talk to one another.

I worked for Umbrellar for a short time, and they were in the same boat, had purchased multiple other companies and each had their own system to be integrated - was a nightmare for us poor CSR plebs, logging into multiple systems. The project was starting when I was there, and far as I know still not completed.

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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#2291615 7-Aug-2019 13:14

floydbloke:
quickymart: I also have to wonder how they got to this point. Vodafone didn't always used to be this bad - neither did Telstra Clear, now I come to think about it...

Corporate greed. Non-stop cost-cutting on service delivery.

Cost-cutting > improved profit > higher price when the company is for sale. A deliberate management and/or shareholder strategy and stuff the customers. The new shareholders are left holding the baby.

Sometimes I just sit and think. Other times I just sit.

FineWine

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#2291637 7-Aug-2019 13:45

Vodafone Call Centre staff need to watch this:

Whilst the difficult we can do immediately, the impossible takes a bit longer. However, miracles you will have to wait for.

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