About Client

Vodafone is one of the leading providers of broadband and associated services both in Ireland and in the global telecom market. The company regularly processes around 3,000 to 4,000 orders at a given time, with around 10,000 new orders for services placed by customers each month.

The Challenge

The Vodafone sales team identified a significant drop off between the initial sale and the orders being completed - with many failed installation appointments. This was not only costing Vodafone money, but was also impacting negatively on customer experience – with the Net Promoter Score for this part of the business at -3%.

Our Solution

Vodafone approached ADEC Arise to help understand the reasons that they were losing so many new sales. We quickly commissioned our data and insights team to analyse the pain points in the process and isolate where — and why — so many customers were dropping out.

The initial failure point we looked at was the first-installation appointments. The failure rate for engineer visits were high, making up around 30% of all appointments– with customers often absent when an engineer called. By examining the process, and studying the customer verbatims that came through feedback channels, our team realised that the customers in question hadn’t been able to organise an installation appointment at all. Rather, installation appointments were automatically generated by the system and often scheduled for an hour that was not convenient for the customer and, consequently, a source of significant frustration.

Our team suggested carrying out a pilot study on selected appointments to identify whether or not proactively engaging with the customer prior to the initial appointment would increase success rates of installations. This additional contact point also allowed call agents to check that the customer had ordered the correct service for their requirements so they weren’t disappointed when the service was delivered. Sometimes customer expectation differed from what was scheduled on the system, so this intervention allowed skilled agents to correct any issues, sell upgrades to customers where appropriate, and make sure engineers were primed to install the correct service.

The pilot proved hugely successful in identifying customer preference to change appointments to a more convenient time, as well as clarifying or updating initial orders. All in all, the pilot achieved a contact rate of 94% in a controlled “lab” environment. The study was then widened to encompass all orders requiring an installation appointment. The team designed a workflow management and reporting system to formalise the processes identified in the pilot. They set a target to reduce failed engineer visits by around 10%.

Since part of the installation process was outsourced to third-party suppliers, the detailed data and analysis we provided highlighted which part of the process was failing. This allowed Vodafone to push back on suppliers and challenge them to improve their teams. They could then put targeted cost impacts on supplier businesses if they didn’t improve their processes, which of course helped incentivise them to tighten up delivery.

Our data and insights team subsequently identified a second problem; failed installation visits were being automatically rescheduled without talking to the customer, leading to yet more unsuccessful engineer visits and compounding frustration. Our team examined the data around multiple failed visits and suggested that appointments should only be rescheduled once an agent had personally spoken to a customer. This step instantly reduced “customer not available” visits by 70%, significantly decreasing costs while markedly improving the average customer’s experience.

A key part of the programme’s success stemmed from actually engaging with customers. We set an 80% customer contact target, higher than the industry average. We tested a series of measures to ensure customer contact, splitting outbound calls between the morning and afternoon, leaving messages, providing a specific inbound contact line, and giving the option for customers to respond via SMS when they were available to take a call.

Our team exceeded their targets for reducing failed installation visits. Most critically, NPS improved from the worrying -3% to an industry leading +42% — at least 14% ahead of the nearest competition.

The data insight team at ADEC Arise were absolutely brilliant in helping us to understand the issues with the sales channel.

When we started the project, we didn’t understand the level of reporting we needed to start to fix some of the problems. ADEC Arise gave us what we needed to not only put in place measures to correct some of the initial issues, but also allowed us to challenge our suppliers to improve their own processes and systems so that we could avoid many of the issues at source. We were also able to improve the training we gave our sales channels, so they could ‘fault find’ before customers got ‘stuck’ in the system. This was a massive programme of work, and never before had we had the level of support and insight that enabled us to drive improvements from first customer touch point to service delivery. ADEC Arise enabled us to deliver significant cost savings and customer experience improvements and was a true partner throughout the process.

-Sylvia Hanley, business care and support manager at Vodafone