The first Vodafone X-Squad team is celebrating launch, with the first team of 12 people based in Auckland ready to solve complex technical issues for customers. Over the coming months more X-Squad teams will be coming online to assist customers.

Antony Welton, acting Customer Operations Director, said: “I’m pleased to report the first X-Squad is up and running. By the end of October we’ll have four X-Squad teams, split between our North and South Island headquarters. These technical customer service experts have been handpicked for their people skills and ability to solve complex problems.

“Starting now, customers who have problems that our front line agents can’t solve will begin to be transferred to an X-Squad case manager. It’ll likely take us until February to hit full capacity but we’re pushing ahead as quickly as possible.

“Our aim is to make solving complex issues as radically simple from a customer perspective. The X-Squad is made up of multi-skilled experts empowered to deliver next-level care for the trickiest of problems. Once they get transferred to the X Squad, Vodafone customers will get dedicated case management all the way through to a fix.”

The pilot for the X-Squad was a specialist group named the TLC Team, based in Auckland. Antony explains: “The knowledge our TLC Team has gained over the past few months has been invaluable in guiding the X-Squad strategy and we’ve been encouraged by the consistently positive customer feedback the team has received.”

The X-Squad was announced in September and is an initial $10 million investment over the remainder of the financial year. Once fully formed, the X-Squad will comprise multiple teams of selected and skilled New Zealand-based agents from Vodafone and our partners Tech Mahindra and Probe, located in Auckland or Christchurch.

As well as case management, the X-Squad will actively monitor for any patterns that might be a systemic problem, and feed insights into other teams responsible for root cause fixes.