Vodafone's Innovative Approach to its Sales Force Management

          For any organisation, its sales force is a major growth engine and a critical resource in which it makes substantial investments. Managing this resource as a productive and a high performing asset is an  imperative, which  no organization  can  neglect without seriously eroding its top line and bottom line performance. At the same time, it is a hugely challenging  task,  given the  ever increasing product  and  market  complexity, an extremely competitive environment, demanding customers and shortage of high performing sales people.

          Sales Managers need to be effective leaders to transform their sales force to a high performance team in which each and every member must perform to his potential. They need to be equipped with the  latest  concepts and  tools to organize  and optimize  sales force, design  and  allocate territories, deploy their resources optimally, supervise effectively and develop leadership skills to monitor and motivate  their teams. 

       Forward thinking organizations are looking to align both their technologies and their culture around a more social vision of service. They are arming employees with tools that allow them to collaborate across the customer lifecycle, and transform every department and customer touch into a high-value communication that is “customer obsessed.”

          After being unable to provide satisfactory voice and data services to many of its customers in Australia, Vodafone came up with a unique solution to address the problem.

To quickly re-engage their customers and change brand sentiment, Vodafone engaged global business consulting firm Bluewolf to: 

1. Design and execute a multi-channel customer strategy, including an implementation of Salesforce Service Cloud, live chat, and self-service.
   
   Thanks to the Vodafone multichannel approach, customers can pick the forum where they want to voice question or complaint -- this can be Twitter, Facebook, email or chat. A seamless experience for the customer equals an engaged, happy customer.
2. Employ a suite of social tools including the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to monitor and manage brand sentiment.
   
   With the ability to monitor brand sentiment, Vodafone is able to deal with crisis situations, reach new audiences, and assess competitive activity.
3. Set up the Social Hub to integrate social conversations as live cases in the Service Cloud.
   
   With this additional functionality and the appropriate processes, Vodafone is able to quickly route feedback internally so that they can engage with customers faster, thereby improving customer satisfaction.

               This approach proved extremely effective and changed the tide for Vodafone vis-a-vis the customer numbers and their satisfaction and sentiment. All the negative chatter about Vodafone on various social media platforms turned into positive chatter. Vodafone is trying to implement this strategy into many more markets where it currently operates.

                     To  learn about how Vodafone helps other companies improve their sales forces, please click on the link given below.

http://www.vodafone.com/content/dam/vodafone/about/what/case_studies/IT_Pulitalia_CS_ENG_Jun12.pdf