Background

Vodafone Group Plc. is a global mobile telecommunications company, with a significant presence in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, and the United States. Vodafone Hutchinson Australia (VHA), a joint venture between Vodafone Group Plc and Hutchinson Telecommunications Limited, is Australia’s premiere telecommunications company. With 3,000 employees and more than 5 million customers, 94% of Australians rely on VHA for 3G coverage. 

The Problem

In 2010, after a series of network blackouts, VHA found themselves facing a backlog of customer requests and a decline in brand perception. Unsatisfied customers were taking to social media, and VHA was at risk of losing customers to competitors. They needed to improve how they monitored and responded to customer service problems across different channels, and address the rising gap between customer expectations and delivery.

The Solution

VHA needed a way to extend and cover social media channels as part of their core customer experience. Phone queues, emails, self-service, and social media — all of these customer service channels had to be integrated and rebuilt into a system that could rescue VHA’s customer service from siloed inefficiency. Using Salesforce Service Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Bluewolf partnered with VHA to design and build a custom service solution that aligned an improved agent experience with the tools needed to monitor, understand, and resolve customer issues faster. Aimed at predicting the needs of customers on their channel of choice, we outfitted VHA with the power to collaborate and crowdsource internally with experts, as well as externally support customer self-service and chat functionality.

The Results

Within six months of moving to Salesforce and integrating social media capabilities, VHA was responding to four times as many customer requests. Customer self-service visits to the website doubled, and the quality of service ratings rose by 800%. VHA went from overlooking key aspects of their customer experience to becoming a leader in social media response, all the while delivering a consistent, superior customer service experience