Vodafone Shift Some UK Customer Care to Egypt and South Africa
Broadband ISP and mobile network operator Vodafone are to shift some of their Customer Care teams from the UK to South Africa and Egypt. The outsourcing move, which is planned to take place in November 2023, may help to lower the operator’s costs but will also put hundreds of jobs at risk.
In a statement released to the relevant teams and leaked to ISPreview this week, the operator highlighted how delivering “simplicity across our operations” was a key part of their ambition to become number one for customer experience. As part of that, Vodafone also said they needed to ensure they’re working as “efficiently as possible“.
The proposed changes involve transferring the work that sits within Consumer Care from Vodafone UK to Webhelp in South Africa. At the same time, the work that sits within Mobile Tech and HBB Tech will also be moving from the UK to VOIS (Vodafone Intelligent Solutions) in Egypt. The changes are both due to take effect from 1st November 2023.
The move will naturally place those affected in the UK at risk of redundancy and subject to the usual consultations. The exact number of those jobs likely to be impacted remains unclear, but our sources suggested it could be in the hundreds. But Vodafone informed us that they will still retain a strong presence in the UK in terms of customer support, and the move only impacts a small number of home-based roles.
The operator’s specialist care team remains in the UK, and they are still actively recruiting in the UK for Consumer frontline teams (they’ve already added around 300 roles to these in the last 18 months). Crucially, they still appear to be committed to growing the scale and scope of their teams in Stoke – more than doubling their team size there in the last 18 months.
Anybody made redundant due to today’s news will be able to re-apply for other roles.
A Vodafone Spokesperson told ISPreview:
“We continually review our structures and ways of working to best serve our customers and as part of this ongoing process we are moving a small number of home-based roles to external partners. The roles affected equate to three percent of our UK based Consumer Frontline teams, and the people affected will be offered redundancy or the opportunity to apply for other roles.”
The development is not said to be linked to Vodafone’s announcement in May 2023, which revealed that the operator planned to cut 11,000 jobs across its global business (here). But at the time it was unclear how many positions would be impacted in the UK.
So if in previous years we saw a trend of telecoms companies moving their support teams back into the UK, then rising inflation and related costs may well be triggering the start of a move back in the opposite direction. Outsourcing support departments tends to be unpopular with consumers, not least because some people find it harder to understand different accents, and it can also result in generally lower satisfaction scores.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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2024 expected news article – Vodafone have the lowest rated customer service score of all ISPs…It is torture beyond all levels of belief speaking to these middle eastern and African call centres.
But given a choice between those or an AI chatbot, I’ll still take the humans.
@NE555: But nobody said they will turn off AI chatbot 😀
I thought that was Virgin Media / O2?
Pathetic! They put greed before CS.
Not the only ones, BT are the same, so are Sky. it seems a lot of these large companies are doing it. I want to talk to someone in the UK if I have a problem, if they can’t do that, then they don’t want my business
BT/EE can be contacted in the UK pretty easily in my experience. Everytime I’ve rang through I’ve got someone from the North take the call. (Though FTTP, which I think they brought UK teams in for – possibly correct for copper services)
If you want a good example of crap outsourcing. Virgin. Sales? Straight through to the UK. Support? None-UK. Probably why they can sign customers up but can’t support them.
Plusnet inheriting SA call centres from the JLP branding (IIRC) also lead to a dip in quality. Wonder who the outsourcer was here though… I know Crapita and “BIG” have BPO in Durban.
They did this with Vodafone Ireland a few years ago. Recently it took me a good 3 months to get an error on a final bill sorted via customer care. Even the escalated complaints email will only get you a callback from a manager at the call centre, who is equally as useless.
Poor decision considering in 2017, Vodafone closed down their South Africa call centres due to years of poor customer feedback. They went on a hiring spree for their new site in Manchester and Stoke. The ratings went up and feedback improved.
6 years later, they’ve decided to get rid of UK and go back to South Africa. What is even the point of doing the same thing and expecting a different result?
I’m from Africa and live in the UK and I know first hand that there’s a complete disconnect in terms of lifestyle, needs and desire across the continents. People here in the UK just live a completely different way of life compared to those in Africa. You just can’t connect with your customer.
Someone having their service or new shiny phone delivered late and are upset, will be met with zero empathy considering they’re speaking to someone who’s worried about putting food on the table or whether the electricity will be cut off again.
I am also from South Africa and I prefer dealing with a South African call centre compared to some grumpy brit who doesnt want to work there. I dont see how having a diffrent lifestyle will make a difference as I dont want to marry them just want to customer service agent to resolve my issue.
A lot of customers are actually unaware of the pain that service agents in Egypt go through to help you. Considering they deal with complex systems, staff that never help you in time of need and the pressure to take more calls over solving a problem. Not to mention that a lot of problems occur when you least expect them because of a system issue. All they are met with is an unsympathetic customer who never appreciates what they’re doing and people who think that just because they’re from Egypt they’re a dead weight to them and ask for a UK adviser. UK advisers are not flawless and can sometimes deny to help you on their own terms. Even if the Egyptian adviser knew a UK person they can’t just transfer the call to them immediately because: A- It’s forbidden to contact a specific person in the company. B- If they did transfer the call they would be met with retribution from their bosses and they could be ousted from the company and lose their job. I tell you, the Egyptians have always dealt with complicated problems and they never stop until they solve your problem.Working in the telecoms industry is an absolute pain in the neck.
Better this than useless AI chatbot or only email as a way of contact. This is something more and more companies doing at the moment. The most annoying thing is that there is nobody in this country interested to solve this issue.
Don’t they realise how much the public hates this. Time for me to switch from Vodafone. For every penny they save there will be a penny lost in revenue.
The problem is, these companies who outsource their customer service to the far east. At the same time they don’t trust these call centres at all. So what they do is release locked down software that doesn’t allow the customer service agent to do almost anything to assist the customer but the absolute basics. These agents have to escalate it to the British workers who get the better software for anything outside of the very basic issue. Problem is, they then don’t give these agents the ability to escalate it to the British agents as all they will then do is escalate everything to the British workers rendering their existence pointless. It means phoning up customer service is a total waste of time.
As someone who worked for Vodafone in one of these teams until very recently, I can tell you it’s going to go down with customers like a lead balloon. The reality is that the vast majority of customers aren’t tech savvy and do need support on fixing problems from time to time. Being met with someone offshore who has no empathy for that customer’s problem causes the majority of complaints – “they didn’t take me seriously”,”the adviser didn’t really care”,”I wasn’t understood”.
UK staff are paid significantly more though & Vodafone just don’t want to have that liability anymore. When they outsource, they can dictate the exact number of staff and hours required to scale based on the demand. New iPhone launch? Black Friday? Gonna be a lot of complaints about pricing, tech issues or cancelled orders, best get all hands on deck. January/February? Much smaller volume, reduce staff and pay for what you need, the other company can deal with moving people around / redundancies.
From a business cost perspective it makes total sense, but anyone with a set of eyes and half a brain can see it’s going be a shit show for customers and a kick in the teeth for long tenured staff.
What adds insult to injury. When customers complain about the dreadful customer service. All you get called is “racist”. I have been called a racist multiple time for complaining about how useless foreign call centres are. They are useless. I have worked in multiple call centres and we all dreaded taking a call after the customer had spoken to one of the foreign agents as they would just lie to customers about everything to get out of helping them.
I work for a US multinational and our South African office is by far the worst performing team globally. In order to obtain government contracts hiring a percentage of locals is a prerequisite. However we are now in a situation where teams outside of SA now have to pick up the slack as the underperforming team are considered untouchable.
A major blow for customers and UK staff. Some customers took up the pro package based on the advertising of a UK based helpline which the quietly got rid of, not a peep out of trading standards or Ofcom regarding this. A massive backwards step by a company who want to be more profitable and have happier customer’s, this will just result in a higher churn rate.
The WiFi Xperts team are still UK based, that hasn’t gone offshore and likely won’t due to what you’ve mentioned RE contract terms / features. Normal tech teams are moving offshore though.
Surprised they haven’t mentioned the move is great for the customers, great for the country and great for the competition like both three and voda said after the merger announcement
Can’t an ISP just add a ‘support in the UK’ tickbox to their forms and add a pound to the price?
More like £5 – £10 and yes they could in theory if enough people gave a toss but the mass-market don’t care enough which is why they look for ‘broadband deals’ with the lowest price possible falsely believing that all ISP’s are ‘BT Resellers’
🙂
I worked for Talktalk in 2009, in their loyalty team. In 2011, they outsourced us to a third party call centre provider and job and customer satisfaction wentdown. Hours were changed, contracts were disputed, it was a mess. Meanwhile, they fully closed down their UK tech support team and shipped it to Manilla. Their customer loyalty team lingered on in the UK under the outsourcer but that eventually got migrated fully to Durban, SA.
These moves to using off shore call centres are very short sighted in my opinion.
From my experience of working for Vodafone in contact centres and retail. (And still do) Moving more care back to Cairo is a strewd move. These guys are experts and have been around for a long time. The guys there have vast expertise and are extremely able. In my experience much better than UK based advisors and can speak better English. South Africa on the other hand… well god help us
Having spoken to Vodafone Egypt and Vodafone UK, I can tell you the Egyptian staff actually seem to know what they’re doing. The UK staff have lied and lied and lied to me and my sister in the past. This is why we’re no longer customers.
Got put through to the tech team in Egypt following a problem with digital landline port to vodafone. The female technician diagnosed & resolved the issue quickly & confidently. Very impressed to be honest. So, whilst I agree there are sometimes probs with offshoring some jobs, in the end it comes down to the quality of staff wherever they are. As for the chatbot, pretty useless I’m afraid.
The last 2 comments must have been written by people on crack cocaine
In my opinion all ISPs and Mobile providers should have their own customer service department their own country the uk for example. Who want people from India Egypt or South Africa
This cycle is timeless. Companies go through phases of outsourcing the CS abroad to save money and then bring it back to the UK when they feel the cost benefit equation has run it’s course and it’s CS reputation has been eviscerated.
Funny though – cutting costs when they’ve provably cashed in on increased prices by increasing theirs well above their costs. They weren’t paying the UK CS advisors all the extra money, so this will further fatten their margins. If you think it’s anything customer centric you’re frankly deluded