hree years ago Vodafone Hutchison Australia was dubbed "Vodafail" and was seen as a national punchline, with its network and customer service targeted by furious mobile users and comedic videos.
But under the leadership of Bill Morrow and his replacement Inaki Berroeta, the company started turning its fortunes around by spending billions of dollars on network investment and increasing the number of Australian call centre staff.
Now fresh data released by the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman show that Vodafone Australia has gone from being the nation's most hated phone company to one with some of the lowest complaint levels per capita. This is a vital point for a company looking to win back customers from Telstra and Singtel-Optus.
The Telecommunications Complaints in Context report for July to September 2015 showed that Vodafone Australia received 4.1 complaints per 10,000 services in operation. This is in stark contrast to the 12.2 it got in the same period in 2014.
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By comparison, Telstra got 5.5 complaints per 10,000 services in operation, while Singtel-Optus got 6.7 in the three months ending September 2015. However, both of these companies have far more users and sell fixed-line as well as mobile services.
Vodafone Australia's latest statistics fulfil a promise made by its director of customer service Errol van Graan in March to become the least-complained-about telco among mobile carriers by the end of 2015.
Best feedback
He told Fairfax Media some of his best feedback came from taxi drivers and fellow parents after they learned about where he worked.
"The TIO stats are a great achievement for our organisation," he said. "But I'm going to school functions and barbecues, where customers are telling me, 'Wow, the experience has really shifted at Vodafone'.
"There's a significant shift in sentiment and people know that Vodafone is back . . . and I'm hoping a large portion of the customers have forgotten [about the problems] and are really focused on what's happening currently."
Vodafone Australia is still losing customers despite a pledge by its previous chief executive Mr Morrow to get positive subscriber growth by mid-2015. But the rate of decline has slowed and most analysts believe it will start winning back market share from 2016.
Independent network testing in October showed that Telstra still has Australia's best mobile network, followed by Optus in second place and Vodafone Australia in third. But all three players had improved compared to the year before.
Mr van Graan said there was plenty of work that still needed to be done when he joined Vodafone Australia in early 2015, after he moved from Telstra to work with Mr Berroeta. Both executives had spent time at Vodafone Romania.
A lot of work to be done
"The organisational turnaround was largely in place but in customer service there was a lot of work to be done in terms of the transformation," he said.
Using insights from data analysis, getting constant feedback from customers and encouraging them to serve themselves via the internet and mobile apps were all helping to improve service levels, he said.
Vodafone Australia is also adopting techniques similar to those used at Telstra, where one staff member is responsible for a customer from their first call until problems are solved.
Many of the call centre workers are based in Hobart, Tasmania – a move the telco says is three times more expensive than basing them abroad.
Increased spending by Vodafone Australia and Singtel-Optus are a key reason Telstra chief executive Andy Penn has pledged to spend more money, at the potential expense of profit margin, to offer a better network experience than his rivals
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