4. Smart Digital Experience

Exceptional customer experience

In today’s highly competitive and increasingly digitalised telecom industry, exceptional customer experiences are as much about touching people in the heart with your brand as they are about high-quality products. To ensure we continue to meet and surpass customers’ rising expectations, we are improving our digital, self-service, data-driven solutions and are working hard to deliver the very best service: super simple, super smart and super personal.

OUR CUSTOMER JOURNEY APPROACH

To ensure our customers remain at the heart of an increasingly digitalised customer experience, we have developed several main customer journey types. Each contains its own macro and micro journeys, processes and activities, helping us ensure the best possible experience for our customers. Through this lens, we gain a clear view of the overall customer experience. This allows us to differentiate ourselves from competitors by being there for customers when it counts – and to provide an exceptional, personalised experience built towards creating ambassadorship as well as cutting-edge products.

IMPROVING PRODUCTS AND PERSONAL SERVICE FOR OUR CUSTOMERS THROUGH DATA INSIGHTS

Data is fundamental to delivering both our organisation-wide digital strategy and our ambition to offer a simple, smart and personal customer service. We know that only by creating valuable insights effectively can we ensure the best results for our customers, delivered via a best-in-class customer experience. We continue to incorporate improvements to our customer experience based on these data insights.

In 2023, we invested in collecting and enriching a range of valuable telemetry data: information about our networks and systems that allows us to proactively solve problems before a customer even notices something is wrong. Based on these data insights, our advisors are also able to proactively contact customers to improve their experience with our products and services.

Datapoints also help us tailor our communications to particular customers or customer groups, make personalised recommendations, create more relevant services and campaigns and carry out more effective evaluations and reporting. Of course, with increasing amounts of data comes an increasing responsibility to protect customers’ privacy and information security. We always ask for the appropriate consent, store and handle data carefully and give customers control over their data. Find out more about our approach in Data security and privacy for customers and employees (new window).

EMBRACING AUTOMATION AND AI

In what was a big year for AI globally, we made further strides in harnessing the potential of this technology to improve the customer experience. As well as expanding our use of AI speech analytics and chatbots in 2023, we launched a new automated system for summarising calls and chat sessions with customers. This means that if a different VodafoneZiggo colleague later continues the conversation, they can more easily review the story so far and the customer does not need to start from scratch. Thus, the technology enables our agents to focus on creating positive personal connections at the moments that matter.

Deepdesk is an example of an exciting new software implementation, auto-completing our agents’ sentences as they type them and thereby helping us respond more quickly. To ensure we balance this high-tech approach with the personal touch we aim to provide, our employees can personalise Deepdesk’s suggestions to fit their own ‘voice’, creating a more authentic human connection. By the end of 2023, this technology was already being used in, on average, nearly one-third of live messaging conversations with customers (30% Vodafone; 22% Ziggo).

Another example is how our Datarobot makes our Digital Technician Assistance (DTA), or Remote Technicians, possible. The DTA consists of a small group of technicians and advisors assisting customers with a planned technician visit remotely, instead of through a physical visit. By analysing more than 100 parameters, such as modem statistics, previous interactions with Ziggo, customer socio-demographics, and the issue at hand, this model makes a smart prediction of the probability of remote solution for a specific customer. By doing so, the Datarobot provides the DTA technician directly with the right customers to contact, reducing the time spent pre-analysing cases where a physical visit is still needed and increasing the chance of remote solution when customers are contacted. Customers are hence serviced sooner and can do so at their own convenience.

BUILDING INFRASTRUCTURE FOR EXCELLENCE

In 2023, to underpin our commitment to creating an exceptional digital experience for customers, we completed our major strategic project to migrate VodafoneZiggo’s business and operations support systems – including more than four million customers – to a new customer relationship management (CRM) system. This milestone in our transition to a new IT landscape is essential in improving customer experiences in near the future.

Indeed, although our real-time Net Promoter Score (NPS) results initially decreased, they quickly rose again as we mitigated customer impact – with notably high scores for hollandsnieuwe (35), Vodafone Customer (18) and Vodafone Business (6) in 2023 – as the benefits of our new CRM system became clear. This system provides strong foundations on which we can build new digital functionalities and develop simpler and more streamlined processes. In turn, our employees are better able to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Our customer service teams were supported throughout the transition by a cultural change programme that encouraged employees to take ownership, generate ideas and solutions and give feedback for further improvements.

NPS CUSTOMERS HAVE THEIR SAY

Our NPS results reveal the extent to which our customers would recommend our products and services to others and highlight areas of the customer experience that could be improved. Using NPS as a guiding tool helps us to become a customer centric company, with services that provide an exceptional and relevant experience.

SPECIALISED SUPPORT

Our WiFi Crew – a team specialising in solving complex internet problems at customers’ homes – increased its mandate and strengthened the connections with our network and product management teams. Our skilled Crew members use innovative tooling and remote visual software to solve some of the most challenging customer connection problems we face, with extremely high rates of success (see A small team with a big impact (new window)).

Meanwhile, our Social Crew is present on all VodafoneZiggo social media channels, helping to alleviate customer dissatisfaction and providing solutions online. We put our customer first, so we set up support around customer situations. For example, an Admin Crew, Entertainment Crew, Proactive Service Crew and New Build Crew in 2023, ensuring that our customers can rely on targeted, expert support.

The Community is our unique peer-to-peer-platform where the issues of individuals are resolved by the power of many, both employees and customers. We also connect with so-called ‘super-users’, who are invited to product testing and provide us with feedback to further improve our products and services. Thus, by providing an environment for knowledge sharing and connecting, we create engaged and loyal customers who contribute to products that deliver an exceptional customer experience.

SETTING UP FOR SUCCESS

We believe a positive employee experience is the key to a positive customer experience. We measure our employees’ well-being and engagement – including how supported they feel by their leaders, the organisation and our systems – and act on any areas for improvement (see Employer of choice (new window)). In this way, we ensure our customer service teams have the motivation, mandates and support they need to deliver the excellent customer experience we strive for. Furthermore, we listen to feedback and suggestions for improvement by our employees to continuously improve upon our customer’s experience.

Our aims are captured in the internal campaign we introduced in 2023, ‘Maak vandaag fantastisch’ (‘Make today fantastic’). This campaign encourages all employees to consistently think about making a fellow employee’s or customer’s day fantastic. We also continued our long-running ‘random acts of kindness’ initiative, where employees send handwritten cards or gifts (such as a Ziggo Dome ticket) to customers to put a smile on their face, remind them of their interaction and strengthen our personal connection.

By providing an environment for knowledge sharing and connecting, we create engaged and loyal customers.

LOOKING AHEAD

In the years to come, we will keep improving our digitally driven customer experience, with the aim of providing a digital personal and smart alternative for 80% of our customer interactions by 2025. We believe that success depends on building high-quality digital experiences – such as finding answers to questions in our app – that customers want to use (and return to). As such, we aim to further explore the potential of generative AI tools and other emerging technologies.

At the same time, we will keep making sure that our customers can choose how they want to be served – whether that means continuing digitally through the VodafoneZiggo app or accessing in-person support from our experts. To this end, we will continue to develop our customer service talent and foster a culture where all employees are equipped and motivated to deliver an outstanding experience for every customer.

Digital organisation

VodafoneZiggo’s ongoing transformation into a digital organisation – driven by data and AI – is the key to unlocking super-simple, super-smart and super-personal customer journeys via digital channels. In 2023, the first year of our ambitious new strategy, we focused on putting strong basics in place for our people and processes, paving the way for progress in the years ahead.

WORKING IN HARMONY

Even in a digital organisation, it is the people – and the connections between them – that make the difference. We further developed our Agile way of working across the company throughout 2023 by establishing so-called value streams, where teams from different departments come together to improve existing customer journeys. Organised based on the tasks, processes and actions involved throughout a given customer journey, these value streams can implement improvements largely independently.

Our value streams work with a quarterly cadence, promoting clarity on our priorities and ensuring better alignment and collaboration. By creating these customer-focused, outcome-driven units, we can more easily track ownership of and progress on objectives and key results (OKRs), across the spectrum of customer, financial, digital and sustainability goals.

CX FACTORY

Our new CX Factory is the innovative hub that designs each new value stream and supports value stream leads throughout set-up and delivery. By using a customer-focused lens and an iterative approach, the CX Factory helps us create super-simple, super-smart and super-personal customer journeys, differentiating the customer experience with VodafoneZiggo and creating more value, faster.

This hub also ensures that each value stream is equipped with a strong understanding of customer needs, the ideas to innovate solutions and the capabilities to build new functionalities where needed – helping us add and improve our digital touchpoints. With targeted focus areas and cross-functional synergies, the CX Factory marks an important step forward for our customer journey work. In 2024, we aim to scale up this way of working across all the customer journeys we have identified.

ONE UNIFIED APP

Over the course of 2023, we built our first combined VodafoneZiggo app, bringing together My Vodafone and Mijn Ziggo. The new app will support a super-simple, super-smart and super-personal customer experience, enabling users to easily manage any of their fixed or mobile products and services in one place, as well as claiming converged benefits. Designed with customer perspectives in mind, the app will act as the gateway to daily digital entertainment. Moreover, it will enable us to reach a digital experience level that compares not only with ‘digital-native’ companies within and beyond our industry, but ultimately with the world’s leading customer experience brands. Our colleagues enjoyed a first taste of the new app in November, ahead of customer testing and wider roll-out in 2024.

The new app will support a super-simple, super-smart, and super-personal customer experience.

ENHANCING EXPERIENCES

There is still more work to do on transforming our legacy IT systems into a flexible, future-proof digital landscape. In 2023, we focused on building new IT capabilities into our platform, enabling us to add more modular functions, micro-services and application programming interfaces (APIs) on top, as required. Each of these small components can be more easily modified and improved before being linked back to the platform. Work will continue in 2024, focusing on guided flows and problem analysis, personalised customer journeys and content and knowledge management.

WORKING WITH AI

AI lies at the heart of our digital transformation, and it is our mission to embed these capabilities across our products, processes, networks and customer journeys. As well as embracing the power of generative AI to support customers(see Exceptional customer experience (new window)), we are exploring more ways of using this technology internally, to create a smooth and seamless way of working for our VodafoneZiggo employees.

In 2023, for instance, we started developing an integrated chatbot dedicated to human resources topics, so colleagues can easily access answers to their queries without having to search through our intranet resources. We are also working with other entities of Liberty Global, one of our parent companies, to develop and improve automated solutions that support our customer service agents before, during and after calls.

Our teams are also exploring the potential of Microsoft 365 Copilot to increase people’s productivity, improve the quality of their work and grow the time spent on more engaging tasks. For our software engineers, data engineers and data scientists, we are experimenting with GitHub Copilot, a tool that enables them to write higher-quality code more quickly. Our data analysts, meanwhile, use DataRobot, a tool that makes it easy and straightforward to build advanced AI models without writing code. Several use cases built by analysts using this tool are already in production.

As we learn more about generative AI and embed it in our organisation, we are taking care to put data security and privacy before all else (see Data security and privacy for customers and employees (new window)). After all, the success of our digital transformation and our ability to create a better experience for stakeholders relies on the responsible use of large quantities of high-quality data. It is important that we can not only understand but also explain the workings of any AI model we design or use, to avoid a ‘black box’ situation.

DEVELOPING DATA LITERACY

To support our digital organisation ambitions, we want all VodafoneZiggo colleagues to train and grow their data literacy skills. To this end, we are making data more accessible for many of our colleagues, enabling them to analyse more information and create dashboards. The more people who can put data to use in their daily work – and make more data-driven decisions – the better we can understand and support our customers.