Vodafone: transforming customer experience with Thematic insights

Vodafone New Zealand has measured Touchpoint Net Promoter Score (TNPS) for many years. Three years ago, Vodafone Group migrated to an established Voice-of-the-Customer platform and Vodafone New Zealand was a key pilot market.

In 2018 the company set an ambitious goal to significantly increase Touchpoint NPS across all customer-facing teams. Thematic played a key role in driving change by providing deep, focused insights. After 9 months of using Thematic, Vodafone New Zealand has seen an overall increase in tNPS and are now challenging their market counterparts in Vodafone global.

Vodafone New Zealand uses Thematic to identify specific themes in NPS measurements through customer verbatim and customer sentiment. Vodafone’s objectives are to understand competitive and market segment insights as well as customer priorities, and to find actionable insights in data.

Tania Parangi, Vodafone’s NPS Evolution Manager, says there has already been a positive return on investment in a relatively short period of time.

“We’re on a mission at Vodafone to transform customer experience – we’re not just tinkering around the edges.  To deliver experiences our customers really love, we need data and insights, which is where Thematic comes in.  We’re then using that data to prioritise and design the changes we make.

“Thematic helps us identify themes in customer feedback which informs where our teams should focus their attention.  They also clearly show us the positive and negative impact of the changes we’re making, so we can adapt and refine in real time.”

Thematic identifies red flags

With Thematic, the Vodafone team can triage the impact an issue is having an enable early awareness to the relevant teams to take action straight away.  The teams are often called on to validate an emerging customer issue and help business leaders, product managers and the frontline managers to understand the scale of the problem. This leads to decisions based on data-driven insights so that limited resources can be focused on the most pressing concerns.

How Thematic works alongside existing technologies

Parangi notes, “Rather than manual, labour intensive categorisation of customer feedback gathered through Voice of the Customer technology, the Thematic product carries out the automated, objective analysis of our NPS data.” This reduces unnecessary workload and provides an unbiased view of root cause issues. By creating greater confidence in the insights being pulled, the business can get on with fixes for the issue, rather than debating its existence.

Our people are leading the way for great customer experiences

It’s easy to blame people when it comes to customer experience. The frontline are often the scapegoats for poor NPS results. Parangi notes that Thematic has highlighted the great things our people do for the customer. “

Thematic shows that our people are friendly, efficient, knowledgeable and helpful which is a powerful story to share with the business”. Our customers are responding positively and if we carry on demonstrating these behaviours we will get higher NPS. Off the back of this insight, we’ve started doing more cross-training, and that’s given us our biggest lifts of NPS. Thanks to Thematic, we know where to focus to drive the change.”

Hitting ambitious targets

Vodafone’s tNPS target this year is being led from the top and is being driven throughout the organisation. Parangi notes that “At the beginning of the year, I wasn’t sure we were going to get there, and that my job just got really hard this year. However half way through the year, I believe we can do it. Our tNPS is tracking alongside our global peers and a big chunk of that is thanks to using Thematic and seeing the issues straight away.”

Continuing this trend, Vodafone believes they will reach their tNPS goal by the end of the year and is excited to work with Thematic to provide customer experiences that Kiwis truly love.