2022 Customer Awards: Vodafone Portugal - Keep Calm and Carry On

Company: Vodafone Portugal

Company background: Vodafone Portugal is today a global telecommunications operator, offering a convergent service recognized in the various segments that make up the market. Leader in innovation, brand image and Customer satisfaction, Vodafone Portugal has nationwide network coverage, reaching 4.1 million homes and businesses with its state-of-the-art fiber network and more than 4.5 million of Customers with your mobile network. Our mission is to improve people's quality of life, increase the productivity of companies, contribute to the development of the information and knowledge society and create value for Portugal.

Contact: João Silva

Title: Call Center Coordinator

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Kudos Category: Keep Calm and Carry On

1. How did your team shift your existing strategy using the Khoros platform to better engage customers during a crisis?

On the night of February 7, 2022, Vodafone Portugal suffered a network disruption due to a deliberate and malicious cyberattack intended to cause damage and disruption. As soon as the first signs of problems on the network were detected, we acted immediately to identify and contain the effects and restore its services. 

The cyberattack affected the provision of services based on data networks, namely the 4G/5G network, fixed voice, television, SMS, and voice/digital answering services. Due to this  we quickly recovered mobile voice services and mobile data services were first available exclusively on the 3G network in almost the entire country. 

Unfortunately, the scale and seriousness of the criminal act to which we were subjected implied careful and prolonged work for all other services and recovery processes that involved multiple national and international teams and external partners, and so, only after 3 day, we were able to secure almost full-service capability.

For 48 hours, only Vodafone Portugal Social Media channels (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Community) were available for our customers as their point of contact with the company as all the rest of the contact center was down. This  heavily impacted our Social Media team since their workload rose by 400%.

For the first time, the majority of incoming public conversation – most prominent on Twitter – became the main source of customer discussion and debate across our social channels.

For reference, here is the overall volume of interactions across our channels in January 2022 before the cyberattack.

Below is the number of interactions that took place in February of 2022:

Overall, this led to an increase of interactions by +307% from January to February. What’s more, we saw a marked increase in posts within this crisis period, as well. For instance, from November 2021 to January 2022 a total of 34,091 posts were recorded. However, compared to that three month period, from February 7th to the 13th 31,416 posts occurred.

In light of this, we needed to adjust our strategy to the crisis. In a competitive market it's easy to be presented with a lot of CRM solutions and as companies get bigger the slower it gets to change strategies due to the complexity of processes and procedures created overtime. 

When it comes to Social Media customer care, Vodafone Portugal needs a strong partnership with a company that can deliver a fast and intuitive platform for customer engagement. 

Our strategy needed to shift from an inbound-outbound basic relationship with our customers to a more social listening one where we take customer contacts as a starting point to gather customer insights, feedback and suggestions.

That’s why in this cyberattack we took full advantage of Khoros Care Analytics to measure how our performance was going during those very demanding days as Social Media was the only channel available for our customers.

2. What operational processes did you create or change to respond in a time of crisis?

Overall, we had to adjust our operational processes quickly to address this crisis. This is where the assistance of Khoros’ platforms came into play. For example, Khoros Care has the flexibility to create assistant profiles with the necessary permissions to start replying to customers ASAP and so we were able to quickly add more Care assistants to the team since our volume increased substantially very rapidly. In all, we were able to see support from our online community, in part thanks to our agile handling of the situation through social media responses, but also through our social media content.

Translation:  “My solidarity goes to Vodafone. I’m so sorry about what happened and I praise the professionalism with which you’ve responded to the attack. All the best for you Vodafone 🙏”

Other features of Khoros Care also came into play. For instance, the tag system is very intuitive. As a result,  we were able to create/add specific tags concerning the topics/feedback we were receiving from customers. A correct categorization of these incoming posts would reflect in future- post-crisis analysis. 

Going further, we added templates to the Care platform suited for cyberattack related posts so our assistants would have all available and updated information to correctly reply.

Since the major topic of contact was cyber-attack related from the get go, we added an automatic welcome response with information forwarding the customer to our cyber attack webpage. This would allow us to filter the incoming contacts to better and quickly respond to our customers’ needs.
3. What success metrics did you use to determine if your shifts in strategy and process had the desired outcomes? What were those quantifiable outcomes?

• Sentiment of incoming posts and conversations - We measured the evolution of our customers' sentiment and how that was measured over time. See the below for an overview of the sentiment cycle, which saw negative sentiment drop drastically since the onset of the attack, with positive sentiment – though it took a short dip – bouncing back up as our strategy unfolded.

• Time of Average Reply (TAR) SLA % - We finished the week of Feb 13th with a TAR of 2h 46m, but given the high volume of the  period,  most replies were addressed within 30 minutes to an hour.

   

• Incoming Posts per Number of Conversations - Compared to January, February saw an increase of 4x the number of interactions or incoming posts. Despite the majority of posts focusing on the cyberattack and system failure – and not regular customer topics – we managed to stay within a 2:1 ratio. To this end, 40,000 of posts corresponded with 20,000 conversations and we were able to agiley and positively provide updates and pertinent information to concerned customers.

• Trending Cyber Attack related Tags - We were able to record 1523 times the use of the word cyberattack in our conversations, which helped us measure concerns and address relevant comments.