One year on from the introduction of the X Squad and investing in more customer experience enhancements, Vodafone NZ is reporting a dramatic rise in customer experience metrics, with a 29 point improvement in net promoter score (NPS) over the past year for a customer’s latest interaction.

The X Squad teams are located in Auckland and Christchurch, and have resolved more than 44,000 complex customer cases during the past year.

Furthermore, Vodafone’s overall customer operations team has seen a 35% improvement in the ‘first time fix’ metric, meaning a customer’s problem is solved the first time they call.

These improvements come despite the challenges of Covid-19 and the increases in call volumes it drove, contributing to approximately 1.7 million customer service calls the company receives each month.

Antony Welton, Customer Operations Director, explains: “We’re really pleased with the results we’re seeing, which represents a lot of hard work across our entire business and within our customer facing teams.

“The X Squad represents an annual $10 million investment in locally-based experts and the team is making a real difference in terms of helping our customers solve their most challenging problems and allowing other customer service teams to resolve some of the underlying root causes.

“Despite the challenges of Covid-19 lockdowns, Vodafone customers have rated their interaction with our customer operations team above an average NPS score of +30 for the past two months, which is a good result for the telco industry.

“But we know we need to continue improving, so we’re investing even more in new technology solutions and additional staff training to ensure we offer our customers a simple, easy and seamless connectivity experience every time they interact with Vodafone.

“We continue to evolve our customer service offering to further improve the experience for our customers, with a focus on best-in-class digital self-service options complemented by awesome people who can troubleshoot the more challenging problems.”

With the advent of Covid-19, Vodafone has seen an increase in digital interactions, with the company’s My Vodafone app processing more than four million visits and seeing a 33% increase in the number of transactions since February 2020.

Welton adds: “Already, customers choose a digital self-service option in more than four in five of interactions, such as topping up their prepay mobile online, or paying their bills via the My Vodafone app, but we also need skilled experts to assist for the more complex inquiries. We’re pleased the X Squad has proven successful so we’ll be evolving and growing this team of New Zealand-based specialists over the coming months.”

To respond to the changing environment with the global pandemic, Vodafone NZ made a number of adjustments to its call centre operations to continue to support customers during a period of heightened interactions. This included adjusting to a fully-remote workforce, with staff answering calls from home. Additional customer service agents were recruited from the company’s retail teams, who were redeployed to help with online service via channels like online chat, virtual remote stores and social media.

As Welton explains: “Social media is a growing channel for customer care and we have doubled the resources for this team over the past year. Internationally, our Vodafone colleagues in markets like UK tell us that social media is a popular option for consumers, and we’ve seen more Kiwis take to platforms like Facebook and Twitter for support during 2020.”

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an index ranging from -100 to 100 that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company's products or services to others, and provides a gauge about their overall satisfaction levels.

For more information about Vodafone NZ’s products and services, or for assistance, please visit www.vodafone.co.nz.