£15m Pumped into Vodafone UK’s Customer Service Improvement

Mobile operator Vodafone claims to have pumped £15m into improving their customer service related training and systems. On top of that they’ve also hired 600 new staff, but it remains to be seen if any of this produces the desired turnaround in user satisfaction.

Lately Vodafone has faced criticism due to a string of customer billing and complaint handling woes, with Ofcom still conducting two related investigations (here and here). The regulator has also suffered a surge in consumer complaints (here), which seems to be mostly related to their mobile network and its tedious switch to a new single system for billing and services.

However Vodafone’s CEO, Vittorio Colao, recently claimed that complaints to the operator’s UK call centres had dropped by 75% since December 2015 (when Ofcom recorded the highest complaints peak so far) and apparently this equates to about 500,000 fewer calls.

A Vodafone Spokesperson said (Mobile News):

“We are always disappointed when customers have needed to raise complaints with us and, more so, when we then do not resolve them effectively first time.

Our teams, at all levels, want to provide our customers with a great service every time but we are clearly not there yet, so are investing significant resources to do so as quickly as we can.”

It’s worth pointing out that many of the above stated improvements may actually stem from an April 2014 announcement, when Vodafone unveiled their £100m plan to hire 1,400 extra staff and open 150 new UK shops (here).

Ofcom will shortly publish the next round of their quarterly consumer complaints report, which should reveal whether or not these improvements have indeed had a positive impact.