[Hands0n]

Have Vodafone off-shored their Customer Services, shutting down the UK operation? I must say that, of late, whenever I phone 191 I end up in an Indian call centre. My enquiries have been fairly straightforward and simple to resolve. And generally, for anything complex I tend to email the CS team.

That said - I have had some really good experience with skilled UK call centre staff solving problems there and then. One I recall is where there was a mixup with the phone numbers across a pair of SIMs. We couldn't swap SIMs because we were distanced apart. So a call to Vodafone resulted in the numbers being swapped across the SIMs within about ten minutes. I would hold absolutely no hope at all of an Indian call centre being able to handle that transaction. And by that I mean any Indian call centre. All operators that use them suffer disgustingly low levels of effective performance.

But I have observed of late that there are more and more comments being passed on Twitter that echo those that are often read about Three's Indian call centre. A typical example would be the following;


Spent 30mins on phone to @vodafoneuk. After being transferred several times, got put on hold, then cut off due to closing time. Shocking !

URL --> http://bit.ly/lz2oda


If this is the direction Vodafone are moving then it is a massive retrograde step for them to be taking. I surely hope this is not what we are to expect from the big red.

[Ben]

Indeed, I haven't called the regular CS line in a while (thank goodness Business customers get treated with a little more respect), but their off-shored operation was bad the last time I used it.

Their off-shored email based support was also dire in my recent experiences. I don't even find their Twitter team to be helpful.

Maybe it's just me but I think Vodafone dropped the ball when Sarin left. But then Colao has said, to paraphrase, that they've moved from a customer-centric operation to a shareholder-centric one. Go figure.

If it wasn't for Sure Signal I'd be gone, gone, gone. :)

(This is someone who used to sing Vodafone's praises when times were good. And Orange's when they were. Nokia's too. Blind brand loyalty is grossly misplaced.)

[Hands0n]

I believe that as customers, we owe it to ourselves to remain agnostic to any one supplier of mobile services. As we have seen, they all have a great capability of going round the circle from Champ to Chump.

Under Colao's leadership the turning of Vodafone's attention from customer towards shareholder instead will damage the relationship with the customer. Vodafone will be turned into a cash cow for the investor with the oft repeated ineviable results. Instead of being focussed on delivering customer satisfaction they will focus only on shareholder dividend. Economies will be made in order to satisfy the share price even if it means reducing service quality. The draw to offshore as much as they can will be irresistable. History will repeat itself.

We have seen it with Orange who were the reference model for how to do it right. Now they are an icon of how to do it wrong.

If you want to foster brand loyalty you have to look after number one, your customer. That means an effective and coherent customer service operation to fix things when they inevitably go wrong. Orange's old reputation drove a brand loyalty that exists to this day, misplaced as it now is.

Vodafone would do well to not follow Orange down that route.

[Ben]

I have to ask; did you write that on the Transformer or the iPad? :D

[Hands0n]

LOL I can see why you're asking. I was using the Asus Eee Pad Transformer (as I am right now). The word suggestion can be a bit aggressive, and I forget to look after hitting the spacebar :)

I do believe that iPads make us a bit lazy :D

Oh, and it was darned late (or early if you like)