-
- About Vodacom
- Investors
-
Financial reporting
Annual reports Annual results Interim results Quarterly results Corporate documents
-
- Press
- Careers
- Your country
-
Select your local site for Vodacom products, services and customer support
South Africa
Lesotho
Mozambique
Tanzania
DRC
-
Company Name and page strapline
Cutting the red tape
Story:
Mapaseka Maphathe’s job at Vodacom Lesotho involves overseeing capital expenditure budgets. On paper, her job has nothing to do with customer care or top-up vouchers. But she believes that regardless of what is written on paper, delighting customers is at the core of what she and all her colleagues do.
Recently friends told her how frustrating it was to top up their prepaid air time. These friends work for either the government or big companies – that buy their employees prepaid airtime.
The employers either send Vodacom purchase orders or cheques with lists of the numbers they want topped up and by how much. The requests are sent to Vodacom where they are processed by the Finance department. They then pass on a top-up authorisation to the Operations department, which credits the numbers on the list. Until recently the customer would have to wait. And wait. Not knowing whether their top ups had been activated.
Hearing about this, Mapaseka wondered: why not create a system that would automatically send SMS alerts to affected customers telling them when they had been topped up? She checked with a colleague in Finance responsible for top ups whether she was correct in thinking that there was a better way of doing things. “She said I was totally right,” recalls Mapaseka. “So I sent a memo to the Managing Director and the system was changed. It wasn’t a big deal but it has helped many customers.”
Mapaseka’s submission to the MD wasn’t a big deal either. Her two-page motivation consisted of fewer than 80 words: two simple flow charts showing how the system worked then and how she believed it should work. For her efforts to cut red tape, Mapaseka was given a prize of a Galaxy tabloid computer but, she says, her submission was really about making customers smile. “Customer care is what we all do. Without customer care, customers aren’t going to crow about us and if customers aren’t crowing about us we’re not going to protect and grow our brand.”
An almost13-year Vodacom veteran, Mapaseka is a passionate promoter of the Vodacom brand. She believes that Vodacom is the best mobile communications operator in Lesotho and that it’s improving people’s lives, hers included.
“I am very close to my mother and have always been inspired by her. In 1970 my father was a politician who went to jail when there was a state of emergency,” she explains. “When he came out of jail my father was very sick. Then my mother lost her job as a teacher but she had eight children to raise and my father could not help because he was so ill. So she started a small general dealer’s store in our village.
“My mother made sure we all got a good education and it’s thanks to her that I’m able to work for a wonderful company like Vodacom. But my mother is now 81 years old and she is frail. She still lives in Mapholaneng village high in the mountains and, obviously, I worry about her a lot. The village is almost 400km from Maseru where I live and work and the roads there are very bad. This means that I can only visit her once a month – but I can phone her any time to find out how she is doing. Thanks to Vodacom we are always in touch. Vodacom makes our lives better. So it’s our job to help make everyone’s lives a little better.”