Enhancing the Customer Experience with Digital

Vodafone Business enables a digital workplace and empowers the digital customer

Vodafone Business is on a journey to become more digital. Creating a digital business - using data to drive agility and collect data from devices, increasing productivity. Enabling a digital workplace - introducing tools and converged communications so employees can collaborate more effectively, and speed up decision making. Empowering the digital customer, through Vodafone Business’s own journey, they are able to assist customers in their digital transformation of sales, marketing and support.

EVE is our Service Operations digital transformation programme. It’s a revolutionary new way of providing a better service to Vodafone's Enterprise customers through a blend of digital workplace, human Interaction and Artificial Intelligence.

It’s the to-do list that never gets done! Every household and business has one – there’s that dripping tap, the shelves that fall down and the lock that keeps sticking. What we all need is a friendly, versatile and reliable person to get the work done. Someone who arrives on schedule, does a great job, every time, at the right price.

The benefits

• EVE has improved service quality and transparency for customers, with real-time access to their interactions, whenever they need it.
• Minimising the occurrence of faults means increased efficiency, which means agents can spend more time decision-making, and solving more in-depth issues
• Blending together the best technology and human interaction through AI, customer portals, fully trained agents and Chatbots, Vodafone has built a scalable and global platform
• Agents are connected through a digital workspace, empowering them to spend more time building valuable customer relationships.
• Improved NPS and first call resolution times.

Increasing customer demand

Vodafone Business’s ambition is to be the leader in Customer Experience Excellence, and with increased demand from Enterprise customers and a dramatic shift in the market landscape, they are expected to provide this experience in more digital ways. Gone are the days of customers simply using phones to contact us. Now, with more technology and less time, customers want speedier and simpler ways to interact, mirroring the methods they use in their personal lives. “What we are seeing from our customers, is a need to move into that consumer space,” says Chris Holmes, Head of Future Operations at Vodafone Business. “Because our customers are consumers as well, we’ve got to make that shift from traditional telephony to digital channels.” Customers today are even self-serving, accessing information and performing routine tasks on their own, at a time that suits them. “Research we commissioned shows that 60% of customers expect to self-serve some part of their experience or journey with B2B providers, Vodafone included,” explains Chris.

With insight from customers and staff, it became clear that to remain current, competitive and to succeed in the market place, Vodafone Business needed to improve service by introducing digital workspaces and a more streamlined customer experience. “We were very much a B2B service desk,” says Chris. “A customer would call an agent, who would then type into the system what the customer is asking for. There is zero value add in that activity, so the ideal thing is to move that part of the process to an online portal, where the customer can type their own request, which can then be automatically fed into our systems.” With legacy systems and agents using up to 23 different applications to complete a customer interaction, Vodafone Business embarked on a transformational journey.

The solution

Following Vodafone Business’s three pillars; personal, simple and digital, the journey began with EVE. “EVE is our overall transformation programme to change customer service operations and have sustainable differentiation,” explains Kerry Small, Head of Customer Service Operations, Vodafone Business. “And service is the only way we can sustainably differentiate ourselves from our competition.” Using an agile development approach, the creation of EVE means customers can self-serve some of their requirements, through a single portal. “EVE provides the clean data, common processes, and the skills required to serve our Enterprise customers more effectively,” describes Chris. “While providing a quantum leap in efficiency and service excellence. Ultimately, it will support the end-to-end life-cycle, where customers can make orders, access diagnostics, manage bills and payments and track orders.” Not only does EVE make the service experience more efficient for customers, but agents now have a single integrated desktop. “No more switching applications to hunt down information,” says Chris. “It’s all in one place, so agents use one screen and can access everythingthey need within three clicks."

One major addition to the digital workplace is the introduction of Artificial Intelligence, and the use of chatbots. “A chat with a bot can be picked up and continued at any time,” says Chris. “So, customers are happy because they can come back to that conversation at their leisure. Conversations can also be passed to an agent, and that’s what gives a seamless customer experience. It’s really about providing convenience, and different channels for customers to interact with us.” Other features include intelligent alarming, which enables diagnostics and correlated alarms, so agents have more information on customer incidents. As well as integrated ticketing, with enhanced customer monitoring, so agents have a complete picture of customer activity and service requirements. “It really is about moving from a reactive, to a proactive experience,” adds Chris.