I got a call later from the number and the guy was polite, knew who I was, didn’t push for extra details when I told him I knew what he wanted and was very interested in the bad press the phone number was getting – so I encouraged him to look it up and show his bosses.

Thanks for this

Reading through your blog I completely understand your concerns about the contact that we at Vodafone have tried to make with you. The number is definitely a Vodafone internal number, as when you call it you hear the voice of Vicky, the same as you’ll hear when calling 191 from your phone.

As you’ve requested to leave Vodafone we naturally try and contact you to see if we can do anything to keep you with us: These calls are sometimes from outsourced teams and sometimes from in-house Vodafone staff.

I completely agree that silent calls are extremely irritating, and we make every effort to avoid that happening. With respect to the security questions that we ask at the start of the call, this is intrusive and I myself would think before giving out information, but unfortunately we have to ask the questions due to Data Protection Law. If you’re ever uncomfortable with giving out your details, you could always ask the caller for a number to call them back on (this will often deter a bogus caller) or better still end the call and call us directly on 191. It’s free from your phone and we’ll always be able to put you through to a similar retention team to the one that called you.

You’ve made some really great suggestions of how we can improve the service:

Making everyone in the organisation aware of the numbers: Good point, even if the numbers may change from time to time. Then again any advisor you speak to over the phone could always dial the number and find out for themselves anyway that it’s us.

Publishing the numbers on the website: Another good idea, the numbers are outbound only so it wouldn’t create a problem whereby people use the numbers to contact us. It’d give excellent peace of mind to customers which I’m sure we’ll all agree is paramount.

Move to a different method of contact: Unfortunately due to the volumes of calls that need to be made, it’s simply much more efficient as a business to use dialling systems. Hopefully in the future we’ll have a way of leaving an automated message if we go through to voicemail, or even if you answer the phone and an agent isn’t available.

Finally, your comment about more advisors posting on forums and blogs is bang on; we’ve recently increased the size of the team who do this, and wherever possible we’ll be on hand to help you with any queries you have in the future.

I’ll feed back the points you’ve made above via Vodafone’s Voice Of The Customer service, so your blog certainly won’t go unheard. If you have any further questions please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Kind regards,

edwardpeter
Vodafone UK