Customer Experience

Times are changing and our customers are changing with them. They are more aware of what they want and more critical than ever. They inform themselves online and compare VodafoneZiggo with other organisations, both within and outside the telecom sector. This critical attitude keeps us on our toes and ensures that we continue to develop to satisfy their wishes. Colleagues from different departments work together to provide the best possible service to our customers - from marketers and network technicians to engineers and customer service staff.

The Customer Experience (CX) department supports the departments in this, using surveys about customer experiences, for instance. We translate the results of these surveys into our processes, products and services. One of the ongoing programs at CX is Future of Conversation. Here, together with colleagues, we look at how customers want to maintain contact with us in the future and how we can prepare for this.

Based on these studies, we know, for example, what the most suitable contact moments are to use a chatbot and we created the My Ziggo-app, which we launched at the end of 2019. We are currently developing a number of CX principles that make it possible to measure the customer experience even better. We apply these principles when developing and adapting each service and each product, in order to give our customers the same experience everywhere and always.

Customer Journey

To gain a good insight into the experiences that our customers have with VodafoneZiggo, we bring their customer journey into focus. That means that together with them we look step by step at what takes place in certain processes. What happens, for example, from the moment they consider their options in purchasing a product? Or what do they experience when they contact our customer service? Based on these experiences, we keep adjusting the customer journey to offer our customers the best possible experience. Beyond that, we use more and more data to get the customer journey in focus and, for example, to predict cable damage or to replace parts in our street cabinets on time.

Among other things, this resulted in the Ziggo WiFi Assistant app and Vodafone Flex.

Improving Customer Experience

We’re working hard on making the customer experience increasingly better. We do this in various ways.

Experience Centre

In the Experience Centre, we use innovative techniques to create a picture of the current and future needs of our customers. We test new concepts together with customers and employees. Together, we examine the opportunities of digitisation and the role our network can play for our customers in this respect. We then determine, in consultation with customers, which products and services offer the best solution to what they seek. We also make extensive use of the knowledge and experience of our parent companies Liberty Global and Vodafone Group.

Fixed Improvement

In 2018 we started the Fixed Improvement program to take the services we offer through our fixed network to a higher level. We followed up on this in 2019, which resulted in a number of improvements for the four million Dutch household and business customers that use our internet and video services:

• The improved performance and greater stability of our network led to a significant reduction in the number of customers experiencing problems with the products and services on our fixed network. This was due in part to the update of our modems and media boxes. This resulted in higher customer satisfaction.

• Since the quality of our fixed network increased, fewer customers needed support from our customer service and technicians. As a consequence, we reduced the number of customer contacts this year by more than 500,000.

• The increase in internet speed that 2.5 million customers received from us was a reason for many of them to remain customers of VodafoneZiggo. We supported the speed increase with the national campaign ‘Snel kan altijd sneller’ (Fast Can Always Be Faster).

Innovation

Through upgrades and innovation we get more out of our networks, so that our customers benefit from greater bandwidth and faster data traffic. We are retiring outdated equipment and simplifying our portfolio. We are, for instance, significantly reducing the number of IT platforms, replacing obsolete broadband modems and upgrading our media boxes. We are introducing new products like the Mediabox Next we launched in 2019, and we are offering special services, such as an app for the visually impaired.

Read more about Innovation in this annual report.

With our GigaNet on the one hand and the advent of gigabit speeds on the other, the benefits to customers who purchase fixed and mobile services are accumulating. The integration of the Vodafone and Ziggo networks created a much more efficient network. Utrecht is the first city in which we introduced 1-gigabit fixed-network speeds through the network. At least half of the 7.2 million households connected to the Ziggo network will be able to benefit from gigabit speeds by the end of 2020. Gigabit internet is particularly suitable for watching films, streaming, gaming and virtual reality without the briefest interruption.

Read more about our Gigabit network in this annual report.

Customer Contact

In recent years, contact with our customers has shifted increasingly to online channels. Customers like to sort things out for themselves. They can do so online, where they are - for the most part - in control themselves. They can adjust their data plans, for instance, view their usage data, purchase subscriptions or schedule an appointment with a technician.

Although we still receive plenty of emails and phone calls, 20% of our customers get in touch through new media such as chat, WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook. Social media has radically changed the nature of customer service, making it faster, easier and more accessible.

Owing to the shift to online channels, we’re making better use of the opportunity the digital world holds. Customer service employees see recommendations appear on their screen about the customer with whom they are speaking. In some instances, the computer can make predictions, which is useful to the customer, for instance when s/he is about to run out of data included in their data plan. Customers receive help from a chatbot, a computer program that provides answers to questions. Customers can receive help from our chatbot, a computer program that provides answers to questions. The advantage of chatbots is that we can help customers 24/7 and help more customers at the same time, resulting in shorter waiting times, or none at all.

Although a chatbot cannot answer all of our customers' enquiries, it can answer the most common questions. For more complex or customer-specific questions, the customer is automatically put through to one of our employees. This places different demands on our service employees. The employee of the future has good social skills and thorough knowledge of a subsector.

Read more about developing our employees in this annual report.

Customer Satisfaction

As a trend-setting technology company, we want to lead the way in terms of service experience. We believe that customers should experience our service as personal, fast and effective. We all do our utmost to achieve this, but of course we want to know whether our efforts are fruitful. To find out, we measure the satisfaction of our customers w.r.t.

• the customer journey

• our products

• our brands