Vodafone, the second-largest player on the Romanian mobile telephony market, in October of last year promoted Ana Alexe, who has been working for the company since 1999, to Director Customer Operations, a position also included in the company’s board. Vodafone is one of the largest companies in Romania, with annual turnover of over EUR700 million and over 8 million customers.
From this position she is in charge of a team of around 1,000 people – employees of Vodafone or of Vodafone partners. Employees include call centers teams, support teams, bill collection teams and those in direct contact with business clients.
With a client base of over 8 million and amid increased complexity of services as more and more clients buy smartphones and tablets and mobile data services, the team coordinated by Ana Alexe has a volume of activity to match: in a month Vodafone receives around 300,000 calls from clients and a further 300,000 calls are initiated by Vodafone to users.
How is this activity managed and how is the performance of people in call centers monitored? The company’s software platform generates reports on the reasons for client calls and in addition Ana Alexe follows the evolution of a set of key indicators, such as clients’ waiting time until they are put through to a consultant, on dedicated monitors.
But things are more complicated than that. “I have in my agenda the dates of concerts, matches, as well as data on the weather forecast. What the weather is like is very important. At Easter for instance, if the weather is nice and people go out for a walk, they tend to contact us less, but if it’s rainy outside and they stay home, they invariably end up talking about mobile telephony and end up phoning call-centers.”
From her position, Ana Alexe’s activity is focused on improving services to clients both through the activity of people subordinated to her and through the feedback sent by clients and by call center operators to other departments within the company.
“I have an extremely important role, to bring the feedback of our call center operators and of our clients “to the table” and to bring talks – which sometimes can tend to become theoretical and conceptual – to the level of reality, to the level of our clients, who may or may not understand our services.”
Ana Alexe says she goes to call centers one day every week to talk to employees and to listen to talks they have with clients. “When you listen to a client, you have a different base to start from, I go to my network colleagues or to the marketing department and say: look, here is what clients want.”
As for initiatives to improve client services, Alexe names the launch of a dedicated call-center for clients of data services and preparations to introduce an option that will allow clients who phone a call-center to be phoned back so they don’t have to hold.
(English version by Daniela Stoican)