21 May 2011 10:48:28 PM: I should add that me and my whole family were loyal voda customers for ten years and never had any problems. My 3 months of terrible reception and 12 agonizing hours on the phone to customer service means il probably never go back. But now, looking at it from a marketing perspective its pretty brutal how in the period of a few months a brand image can be completely destroyed.

22 May 2011 12:50:35 AM: which uni you at??

You should google skype because they had problems too, but managed them totally differently to Vodafone - they apologised and issued free credit to everyone (I think, I read about it ages ago) but whatever they did they did a good job and people knew they were genuine about it and honest about owning up to their mistakes, which made people feel less unhappy :) Voda, by contrast, ...well you know what happened there.. crocadile tears from Nigel Dews and no real action, placing every possible barrier between a sane customer and the exit!

Here's what I'd recommened:
First and foremost, prevention is the best cure, so they should have known in advanced that their infrastructure was inadequate - in marketing courses they never shut up about how important marketing research is - and this is a perfect example of why! They should have ensured quality, because losing loyal customers (which are cash-cows for the company) are like losing gold bullion - last thing you want to do!

Assuming they made a massive oversight and allowed this to happen, they should:

i) conduct a company inquiry into it immediately to learn how severe the problem is. Act soon to nip the problem in the bud, do not wait 3 or more months before taking this step.

ii) make a press release stating the problem, it's cause and what people can do to get around it (where possible)

iii) give something back to all customers to win back faith, it could be something small but just the acknowledgement to say "my bad"

iv) knowing that some customers, esp the self-employed and business customers, need their phones to be reliable, they should give customers an easy way out with no contract termination fees - that's the very least they should do - most of the furor was because of a relatively small (by "small" I mean 40,000 or so, which is small in relation to their total customer base) number of customers who relied on their phone's reliability, and were let down.

v) do not under any circumstances get your call centre to lie to customers

vi) make sure your call centre staff are capable in terms of their product knowledge and representation - do not allow your image to be degraded by poor resourcing of customer service staff (the Tasmanian ones are just ok but the Mumbai makes auschwitz seem welcoming). Make sure there's no incentive for call centre staff to transfer calls endlessly, infuriating customers.

vii) Vodafone should liaise with regulators (namely the TIO) to advocate for them to undertake a massive and ongoing marketing campaign of their own to ensure full awareness, so dismayed customers know where to go if Vodafone or any other telco aren't handling their enquiry properly. Why should Vodafone do this? because it would actually benefit them by incentivising them to improve their service - at present they have no reason to improve because the 1/100 customers that actually go to the TIO has so small an effect (usually less than $100) that it's not worth Vodafone worrying about it too much.

viii) give customers accurate timeframes as to when services will be functioning, and send that to them (don't make them have to go out of their way to find it).

That's my 2c. Actually, it's a lot better then anyone at Vodafone could come up :)

22 May 2011 04:21:35 PM: Thanks so much for your response. Has given me some good ideas!! I'm not at uni, work in the industry, but doing weekend school. Would lOve to run my idea by some people but I know other people from class will be checkin this site haha. Thanks again for ur insight!!