A total communications company
Our industry is changing, and so are the needs of our customers. Our strategy is to become a total communications business. We are offering our customers a range of new services including DSL and broadband services, mobile internet and mobile advertising. These will add to our traditional services, which include mobile voice calls, texts and data.
Vodafone is well positioned to offer these services. Customers expect to be able to access internet services such as instant messaging, social networking sites and search facilities on their mobile. They also want to be able to transfer music, contacts and other content between their mobile and computer. We call these seamless interactions total communications. We are introducing a range of new total communications services for use both at home and in the office, to help meet our customers’ changing needs.
Building capability
It is important that our team has the right expertise to respond to the changes in our business and the industry, and make the transition into a total communications company.
We have developed a range of tools to make sure our people understand this new strategy and the changes in the industry, and have the appropriate knowledge and skills to support our new products and services. Many of these tools use new web 2.0 technologies and communication channels, such as wikis and blogs, to deliver key messages and training.
Our total communications strategy was launched with 10 podcasts and six webinars (seminars broadcast on the web) in 2007. These were viewed by over 3,300 people, who contributed to a live online debate with comments and questions. Live polling was used to gauge audience views. We also launched our first company-wide wiki – an online community – enabling employees to join in the discussion, share content and add their own opinions or resources to the conversation. The total Communications wiki has been visited over 55,000 times since it was launched.
In 2007/08, 4,500 of our managers received a total of 36,000 hours of training on total communications. We plan to train the rest of our employees through an interactive web-based training tool.
Frank Boulben, Director of Strategic Marketing and Commercial Planning, said: "The course was one of the best I have attended. It brought people together from different backgrounds and levels of knowledge, and gave people a much better understanding of why we’re pushing in this direction."
The programme coordinator Jonathan Helps said: "People have really engaged with the training, saying it’s the best thing Vodafone has done. They liked the format, which is highly interactive, with lots of discussion and working in teams. The great thing is that the content has contextual relevance to people and they got a lot out of it."