How we’re working to make VodafoneThree the #1 telco for customer experience

07 August 2025: Let’s be clear, no one likes having to call up a company to complain. It can be time consuming, frustrating, and usually means something isn’t working as it should.

It’s not an ideal situation for companies either, given the damage it can cause to brand reputation – not to mention the financial costs involved. In fact, the Institute of Customer Service most recently reported that problems and service failures cost UK organisations £7.3 billion each month.

In a competitive industry like telecoms, and with connectivity being vital for people’s everyday lives and businesses, these consequences can quickly escalate if a company does not take its customer experience seriously. What’s more, it can be difficult to reverse a customer’s experience with your business once an impression is made.

The good news, however, is that you can, as the following actions demonstrate.

How we measure customer experience

Vodafone, for instance, has made huge progress when it comes to customer experience over the last few years. We know this because Ofcom, the industry regulator, reports on a range of our business metrics, with many related to the volume of customer complaints.

Ofcom’s latest results show Vodafone has achieved a record low of only one complaint per 100,000 customers for mobile, and three complaints per 100,000 for landline.

For home broadband (HBB), meanwhile, Vodafone has maintained its score of 11 complaints per 100,000 – continuing to improve from 12 and 16 in previous quarters.

While the figures are impressive, it’s taken a lot of investment from our business and hard work from our team to get here. Much of which we structure around a three-part process: listen, simplify, change.

To help pull back the curtain a little, here are some of the ways we’re using this framework to make VodafoneThree the #1 telco for customer experience.

Listen: Getting closer to our customers

While a lot of our staff talk to customers every day, many others aren’t customer-facing. Rather than working at a retail site or a customer service centre, they might spend their time out and about visiting network sites or in one of our corporate offices.

Wherever they’re based and whatever their role, it’s still important that they understand the needs, expectations and experiences of our customers. After all, customer experience ultimately plays a significant part in dictating the success of our business.

For staff that work behind the scenes, however, it can be trickier to understand what our customers want, what frustrates them, and how we can make things simpler. Which is exactly why Three’s ‘Core to Store’programme exists.

As part of the ongoing aim to foster a deeper understanding between head office and frontline colleagues, the programme gives core colleagues the opportunity to spend a day in one of our retail stores, shadowing our frontline advisors.

This hands-on experience helps give non-frontline staff a valuable insight into what’s working well or where we can enhance the customers journey.

On the Vodafone side, while it’s not quite the same as having them shadow customer-facing colleagues, our ‘Closer to the Customer’ microsite is arguably the next best thing for office-based staff.

The site hosts a range of materials that are designed to give these non-frontline customers a deeper understanding of customer experience. This ranges from our overarching strategy to real-life customer call recordings, as well as a virtual tour of our Stoke Centre of Excellence and various ‘day in the life’ views from some of our team members.

Given that we make sure to update it regularly, based on feedback from across the business, it keeps these colleagues up to date with the latest developments in the world of customer experience.

Simplify: Designing frictionless CX

Arguably, however, the key to good customer experience is simplicity. If we can remove any friction during the instances where customers need to interact with us, we can usually make the experience more enjoyable.

This is the thinking behind our latest customer service offering, ‘Just Ask Once’, which will see one person deal with a Vodafone customer’s query – from start to finish – until it is sorted.

It’s based on the principle that people don’t get passed from agent to agent, enabling clearer lines of communications for both our teams and customers.

By doing so, we can help remove well-known bug bears like waiting on hold or having to repeat the same problem to various service agents.

In fact, we’re so confident in this approach that, if Vodafone can’t provide the service it’s promised, then customers are free to leave with no exit fee.

In a similar vein, our new ‘Fix & Go by Vodafone’ service aims to take the inconvenience and expense out of handset repairs, by partnering with Fonehouse to introduce in-store repairs of Samsung, Apple and Google handsets – on any network.

It marks the first step in VodafoneThree’s goal of expanding its stores into service hubs, rather than purely a place to buy handsets or accessories. And, in the process, it shows our ongoing commitment to maintaining a significant presence on the high street.

Change: Training for tomorrow

While we’re hugely proud of all of this progress, we know that more is always needed. Because, as technology develops, so do customer behaviours. And, with them, customer expectations change too.

This means there is no time to rest on our laurels, which is why we’re always taking steps to meet emerging challenges, such as the rollout of customer service training.

Recently, that’s involved cross-skilling our frontline staff to help them deal with more issues, such as fraud. This makes it much more likely for customers to get through to the right person first time round.

Vodafone’s TRUST framework training, delivered to all 12,500 customer care employees, forms an important part of this, by providing teams with a model that builds customer trust and supports agents when dealing with difficult enquiries. Having been delivered to the entire Commercial Operations frontline, our first call resolution rate has risen to 77%.

From a Three perspective, our ‘Great Conversations’ training – based around a framework of ‘Care, Connect, Match and Attach’ – empowers every single retail colleague with the knowledge needed to deliver meaningful, personalised interactions that truly resonate with customers.

All of which ladders up to a better performance for us and, more importantly, a better experience for our customers.