Is Vodafone setting the new standard for webcare?
Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2025 10:07 am
Social media loving Netherlands gathered in Amsterdam on February 9 for The Social Conference , organized by Emerce and Krem. In a sold out Pakhuis de Zwijger many eagerly awaited a new dose of facts, figures, trends and inspiring visions about social media.
In this piece I discuss the sessions of Marco de Mooij (Vodafone), Arno Rutte and Sander Dullaart (Menzis) and Steven van Bellgehem (Power to the people).
In 2007, Vodafone actively embraced social media by monitoring online sentiment. In 2011, this earned them the title of 'most active brand on social media'. To reinforce their service proposition and improve customer experience, Vodafone launched a new campaign a few months ago: Vodafone Smartphone Crew.
Through various touchpoints (social media, shop, e-mail, etc.) customers can contact us 24/7 for questions or problems with their smartphone, tablet or mobile internet. For this purpose, Vodafone has put together a group of 140 trained employees. Vodafone aims to respond to the customer's question within 60 minutes and to offer a solution to the problem within 24 hours.
This may be an ambitious goal in some cases, but together with 24/7 accessibility, they are giving a clear brother cell phone list service signal to their customers. I wonder who will follow in addition to Vodafone and KLM. According to Marco de Mooij, in some cases even customers of T-mobile and KPN come to them with questions.
What does it actually yield?
How do you measure the results of your social media efforts when they are focused on service provision? Vodafone still seems to be struggling with this. Apart from registering the usual social interactions (direct posts, messages and mentions), the Net Promoter Score is the main focus . A methodology that can measure the influence of these activities on turnover is still pending.
The ROI of good customer insights is also not easy to determine, but customer insights are essential in the continuous optimization of your service provision. Vodafone therefore considers the webcare team as 'the eyes and ears of the organization'. Partly for this reason, the in-house webcare team has been expanded to 15 people.
In order to answer customer questions efficiently and adequately and not to send problems back to the organization every time, Vodafone pinpoints common problems. The challenge is to place these types of pre-digested solutions in the right context of the conversation with the customer. Without the right context, there is a risk that the answer of the webcare employee is not experienced as authentic and sincere and the customer feels fobbed off with a standard answer.
In this piece I discuss the sessions of Marco de Mooij (Vodafone), Arno Rutte and Sander Dullaart (Menzis) and Steven van Bellgehem (Power to the people).
In 2007, Vodafone actively embraced social media by monitoring online sentiment. In 2011, this earned them the title of 'most active brand on social media'. To reinforce their service proposition and improve customer experience, Vodafone launched a new campaign a few months ago: Vodafone Smartphone Crew.
Through various touchpoints (social media, shop, e-mail, etc.) customers can contact us 24/7 for questions or problems with their smartphone, tablet or mobile internet. For this purpose, Vodafone has put together a group of 140 trained employees. Vodafone aims to respond to the customer's question within 60 minutes and to offer a solution to the problem within 24 hours.
This may be an ambitious goal in some cases, but together with 24/7 accessibility, they are giving a clear brother cell phone list service signal to their customers. I wonder who will follow in addition to Vodafone and KLM. According to Marco de Mooij, in some cases even customers of T-mobile and KPN come to them with questions.
What does it actually yield?
How do you measure the results of your social media efforts when they are focused on service provision? Vodafone still seems to be struggling with this. Apart from registering the usual social interactions (direct posts, messages and mentions), the Net Promoter Score is the main focus . A methodology that can measure the influence of these activities on turnover is still pending.
The ROI of good customer insights is also not easy to determine, but customer insights are essential in the continuous optimization of your service provision. Vodafone therefore considers the webcare team as 'the eyes and ears of the organization'. Partly for this reason, the in-house webcare team has been expanded to 15 people.
In order to answer customer questions efficiently and adequately and not to send problems back to the organization every time, Vodafone pinpoints common problems. The challenge is to place these types of pre-digested solutions in the right context of the conversation with the customer. Without the right context, there is a risk that the answer of the webcare employee is not experienced as authentic and sincere and the customer feels fobbed off with a standard answer.