Vodafone Turkey began a five-year CX transformation program in 2018, and when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, the company like many others was forced to expedite it. Vodafone Turkey aimed to enable staff to conduct meaningful, fulfilling work at home by accelerating the development of a unified digital platform to collect, store and democratize data to make it available for everyone in the company to use.

Before its transformation, Vodafone Turkey was operating siloed systems with isolated data. There was no linkage across planning, deployment and operations, which made collaboration between teams difficult and increased the burden, frustration and workload of employees. This resulted in poor operational efficiency and passive operations and management, a situation that was exacerbated by increasing network complexity as the company began moving from 4G to 5G.

As part of its transformation, Vodafone Turkey decided to focus on three important employee-related challenges: how to get them excited about change, how to help different departments and teams benefit from automation, and how to simultaneously support meaningful home-working due to pandemic-related restrictions

Vodafone Turkey addressed the challenges in several ways:

• Involving employees in the CX transformation from the outset – led to employees feeling invested and experiencing a sense of accomplishment.
• Creation of the unified digital platform to collect and store network data – the amount of data the company is collecting has increased by an order of magnitude over the past few years and could no longer be handled manually. The new centralized platform, which runs in Vodafone Turkey’s data center, automatically detects network faults and supports network planning and optimization with AI applications. These improvements made it possible for employees to connect remotely during the pandemic.
• An enhanced complaint-handling system and user interface that combines all network and customer data and shows it on a single screen – this makes it easier for employees to proactively assist customers.
• Use of robotic process automation (RPA) – digital workers help human employees troubleshoot problems and respond to customers more quickly.
• Reskilling network engineers with skills in RPA and data analytics – continued learning has led to increased job satisfaction.

Vodafone Turkey used TM Forum’s Business Process Framework to scope the project and define improvements, and the Digital Maturity Model to benchmark maturity and define best practices for revenue assurance and ecosystem development. The company also relied on the Forum’s Customer Experience Maturity Model, Customer Experience Lifecycle Metrics and the AI and Data Analytics Maturity Model.

As part of the transformation, Vodafone Turkey has also introduced a new strategic indicator called the Customer Experience Index (CEI), which is defined in the Lifecycle Metrics guidebook and aims to reflect the overall experience of each end user.

“By using CEI, we could monitor, understand and improve customer care, network planning and optimization,” Günyel explained. “This also gave our staff a common KPI to focus on, and virtually all roles in the organization were in a position to positively impact this KPI.”

The CEI data and insights enable better decisions by each stakeholder. For example, Vodafone Turkey can now provide one-step complaint handling tools to ease the burden on front-line agents and automated fault analysis and demarcation tools for second-line support staff.

The impact of digital transformation and automation has been significant. In addition to the employee benefits described above, Vodafone Turkey realized a return on its investment in CX transformation just three and half years into the five-year program and has seen nearly a 10% increase in new revenue generated by an algorithm that determines where to add mobile base station capacity.

Customers are happier too. By the end of 2021, Vodafone Turkey’s call center net promoter score (NPS) had increased by 31 points and its complaint resolution rate improved by 20%. Similarly, ticket handling time decreased by 20% and the capacity for handling analysis of customers’ complaints increased sevenfold.