Telco giant Vodafone to cut 11,000 staff as part of its turnaround plan UK telecoms giant Vodafone aims to lay off 11,000 workers over three years as part of an action plan to improve operations and put the focus back on customers, following a period of relatively poor performance. The blueprint was disclosed as part of Vodafone’s preliminary results for its fiscal year 2023, with newly appointed …
I agree. It's always a bad sign when a company in trouble decides to spend money on marketing rather than improving the product.
Classic signs a company is in trouble:
1) The HQ is refurbished
2) The C-suite get new, expensive limousines
3) Re-branding to 'freshen up'.
4) Company flags go up outside office locations
Essentially, when the C-suite start valuing image over substance, the rot has set in.
Exactly, instead of pissing money on a rebrand, just offer good value, then people will come. £x million spent on a rebrand won’t give them long term customers once they realise that better value is to be had elsewhere. I’ve never picked anything based on how cool their advertising/branding is. I want value for money!
"I’ve never picked anything based on how cool their advertising/branding is."
I'd be inclined to be negatively influenced if anything. The more that gets spent on such fripperies the less gets spent on the product.
Yup.
Colliers marketing the sale and leaseback and repositioning opportunities of the Newbury campus
Vodafone will remain the occupier of four of the buildings, the remaining three buildings Babbage House, Faraday House and Clarke House, which comprise of a total of 210,492 sq ft of office space will be available for repurposing for other occupiers, or even redevelopment for sectors such as residential, life sciences, media or logistics.
Paywalled: Property Week:Vodafone agrees sale and partial leaseback of UK HQ amid downsizing
Customer experience improvements are usually good. Hopefully, when you buy something, you won't need to contact the provider much, but if you do, it's good to get good service.
Branding? Not so much. Branding might get you noticed in a busy market, but once you have a product or services, Branding doesn't matter one jot. Unless you are a right winger. In that case, you probably do think beer tastes worse because the brewer decided to put a photo of a trans person on the can, or criticised it's own use of women in bikinis in advertising in the past.
> I switched last month when VF wanted to bump my bill by 13.5%. Both packages were SIM-only.
I was mildly (to put it politely) miffed when I bought a new phone/contract back in February, only for Vodafone to then bump the entire package cost up by 13.5%.
I can accept that they have a right to raise the cost of the service in line with inflation, but roughly 90% of the contract cost is the phone - which has already been purchased by them and delivered to me. So they're essentially getting somewhere around £300-£350 extra from me over the next two years (assuming there's another similar price rise next year), while not actually doing anything to justify this increased charge.
I may have a look at buying out the contract, depending on what the profit-forgone calculation ends up being.
However tossing 11,000 staff is hardly likely to improve performance.
3UK are also on a downward spiral having fucked off customers with their treatment of existing contract holders, abandonment of Go ROAM, and increasingly shocking customer service. The only bright spark is their value offer @ SMARTY.
If you think their customers are suffering you should see what their staff have to put up with. Vodafone have "big company disease" in spades. If they make those 11,000 redundancies in middle management then nobody will notice the loss in headcount. In fact most probably afterward more work will get done faster and with less hassle. Most of Vodafone's output is meetings on Teams.
Recent customer experience: truly awful.
I can’t even be bothered to say why but when you offshore and disempower front line staff, you fucked it. The disempowerment kills your ability to provide a service and the offshoring says you’re a penny pinching twat that knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
when will they understand that a good customer service is the best way to keep customers?
You're asking the wrong question. Modern boardrooms generally don't give a shit about customer service. Apart from recognising it as an overhead that costs too much. Their main concern is greed and short-term personal gain. Engineer an artificial boost in profits and/or share price, cash in their bonuses and stock options, then bugger off leaving a fucked company for somebody else to fix. There are far too many examples of that behaviour.
"Meanwhile, to win back consumers, Vodafone said it needs to “refocus on the basics” and deliver a “simple and predictable experience” that it believes customers expect"
And they do this by turning off the 3G network. That's a great move, especially when I'm sat in the garden of a relative's house and all I get there is 3G.
That's exactly what I want from a mobile phone provider, less coverage.
My boyfriend purchased Vodafone full fibre about 7 or 8 months ago now, as it reached his area before me. It took them over 6 months to actually get it installed and working with multiple engineer visits - a couple because they didn't have a standard FB2 key to open the maintenance cupboard. By the fifth month he'd finally gotten through to a very helpful agent who kept him posted on the whole thing as well as the complaints department which is when it finally got moving.
About a fortnight before they actually fixed it (6 months in), they offered him mobile internet which they'd pay for but he'd have to go through the process to get a contract for it - of course, it would never be that easy and he failed the credit check for mobile broadband despite passing them for fibre broadband, what a laugh. After he got a sim and about a week before they did actually put data onto it but it was a big faff again (seems to be the vodafone touch).
In the end, he has been compensated for the downtime and now has 18 months of his contract paid but that still doesn't really seem worth it for all the hassle. Recently they offered the service in my area and I decided not to take them up on the offer after this whole faff. If they actually fixed these things on time it might help their brand. Hoping as a three customer that they don't buy them out as I don't want to deal with their customer service and prices, but we'll see.
Vodafone is pulling out of markets at the speed of light. They've recently exited New Zealand, Qatar, Hungary and there are talks that they may pull out of Spain, Czechia and other countries as well. Plus they spun off their European network infrastructure to a company called Vantage Towers. So while they may be full of cash, a fair share of that reduction in workforce probably comes from further or ongoing contraction in global presence.
Assuming the average expense with those 11k workers is around 75k per year, we're looking at 825 million pounds being "freed up", or ~6,35% of their yearly income of 13 billion.
I wonder, if the head cutting started at the top, how many directors/chief-whatevers would have to be fired to achieve a similar saving.
The office has a competitive “ who can operate with least monthly spend” - im winning with £3.99 legacy ID Mobile account.
After many fruitless hours listening to music on hold when helping my parents with two Voda accounts and shocking bills ( considering they rarely left the WiFi) we moved them both to penny mobile , realised mum n dad now have bragging rights as the monthly spend is £2.50 each!
Some interesting deals on simonly co uk
VF were recently informed by some of their HW suppliers that (as I work for one of them) we do not want to continue to do business with you as it is unsustainable.
They put out RFPs for kit where you end up barely making a $ and then they change their mind half way through the contract to renegotiate prices down.
Working with VF UK is a joke, eveyone has their own agenda and everyone is more important than the other. In VF Italy, Spain, New Zeland VF are a completely different animal and are a joy to work with.
What is happening to VF is all the fault of their management. I see other CSP/T1 suppliers doing well in the current climate, but not ever VF.
They should ditch their lazy, clueless middle and top-managers and maybe they'll have a chance of recruiting fresh talent. Immediately after, a streamline of thousand of legacy, obsolete, incompatible and chaotic IT applications
Being an employee (but not a UK one) I can say that it's probably a good thing that is happening. If you have a look at how many members of the board have resigned or been replaced, across all of the various Vodafone countries, this has probably been brewing for a while. Hopefully the "new" board members will actually think of asking the staff where there can be savings instead of just cutting positions.
Customer service is always a key part of the business, and this definitely needs to improve, even internally trying to get anything done is a challenge. The quality of the products is questionable, but that is mostly because so much of it is outsourced to suppliers who don't get paid enough to verify it properly and then it ends up getting implemented and only working some of the time. Activities are starting to be brought in house again, but maybe not in the right places.
Saying that, the fact that they recognise this and are adjusting is the start of something good. Things do need to be simplified, there needs to be a bit of a consolidation of products and stop reinventing the wheel. Also, how's about reducing the office space, there are offices everywhere that are hardly used, how's about limiting it to a few and making the working from home policy as standard. That at least is environmentally friendlier, and saves on a hell of a lot of electricity and can probably halve the amount of positions that need to be gotten rid of.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
