Customer Care

We continue to invest in continually enhancing customer care, evidenced by improved call centre service levels, first call resolution and higher customer satisfaction results. The primary service level measure of 70% of calls answered in 20 seconds improved by 9.7% year-on-year to 73.3%, with the data call centre service level up 6.3% to 73.7%. Call volumes into the Customer Care Interactive Voice Response units (“IVRs”) dropped by 12% to 152 million calls for the year. Over the same period non-directory enquiries calls to agents declined by 16% to 43 million calls. These changes can be attributed to self service initiatives, fewer repeat calls and a maturing market. Agent efficiency improved significantly with the ratio of customers per agent increasing by 43% year on year to 14 537 customers per agent.

These improvements have been achieved by focused initiatives in a number of areas including single skilling agents which has lead to fewer repeat calls, improved self service on the IVR (72% of all calls were managed via IVR), web and keyword SMS services, regular customer satisfaction reviews and ongoing process improvements.

A total of 50 143 staff in the distribution channel were trained during the year, substantially up from 22 743 in the prior year. E-learning received the greatest response and 24 242 e-learning completions were achieved compared to 3 248 completions in the previous training year.

Our well-established customer loyalty programmes are designed to underpin Vodacom’s reputation as a caring company and to reduce churn. These include the Onyx and Platinum programmes for contract customers, and our Talking Points programme for prepaid customers, which gives points per recharge that can be redeemed for airtime and special offers. In the year, 3.5 million redemptions were recorded. Our Yebo Millionaires game show attracts well over 2 million SMS entries per week, with more than 680 000 customers having won prizes and three instant millionaires created in the last year. At the heart of the programme is a strong community investment element, and more than 50 schools across the country have been provided with computer centres with funds generated from the initiative.