Vodafone tries to divert attention from continued customer service fails

Ofcom’s Q3 complaints data still has Vodafone dropping the ball so the operator wants to talk about its enterprise wins instead. Good luck with that.

Vodafone was marginally the most complained-about UK postpaid MNO a couple of years ago, then it has the bright idea of overhauling its BSS and a bunch of other back-office software all at the same time and things went horribly wrong. As you can see from the Ofcom table below, the complaint rate spiked at the end of 2015 but, to be fair to Vodafone, has been steadily coming down since then. Prepaid customer don’t seem to bother complaining at all.

Nonetheless Vodafone still gets twice as many complaints as the next UK MNO and it’s not just Ofcom flagging this problem up. A further humiliation was delivered by the Guardian newspaper, which recently ran a piece giving out awards for the worst customer service of 2016, based on anecdotal correspondence with its consumer advice column. Vodafone was pronounced ‘The one you most love to hate’. Ouch!

Perhaps keen to divert attention from this ongoing fail, Vodafone chose to send out a press release today announcing the accreditation of over 100 partners to its new enterprise programme. Apparently the programme ‘focuses on delivering customer service excellence in enterprise mobility, connectivity solutions and unified communications,’ as opposed to consumer billing.

“We have designed our new programme to equip our partners with the highest-levels of training and support around our portfolio of technologies,” said Nick Birtwistle, Director of Partners and Strategic Alliances at Vodafone UK. “We believe this will help them to take a leading position in this new era of communications and provide continued service excellence for customers. We’re delighted to announce the first Partners to our programme and will continue to work with the many others who are aiming to qualify for the programme ahead of our second accreditation date in June.”

So that’s alright then. Nothing to see here, move along.