How a telco copes during a pandemic with Lisa Corcoran Vodafone

This is the first of a two part interview with  Lisa Corcoran, Head of SME Business, Vodafone, Ireland. Lisa has over 25 years’ experience across the Telecoms and ICT industry and has held a number of senior roles, working with O2, Telefonica, Three, Eir, and Xerox. Lisa joined Vodafone Ireland in April 2019. Within Vodafone, Lisa is responsible for strategic partnerships and indirect sales channels within Vodafone Business.

Right now we’re living in, we know, in strange times. So how does Vodafone cope during the pandemic Lisa?

So you’ve asked me how are we coping and in terms of Vodafone at the moment? It’s been a busy few months.

So in the first lockdown, we saw mobile and broadband traffic, shoot up. Weekdays by 50%, and on weekends, a 70% increase. Fortunately, the ongoing investment that we have in the network really means that we keep the network to the highest standard for our customers, which is imperative.

It’s absolutely the backbone of everything that we’re doing. And we also accelerated a high priority upgrade program to tackle the vast majority of these new pain points in a very short space of time.

We prioritise network infrastructure in hospitals and healthcare services. So you’ve seen probably, a lot around how we supported the healthcare services, both from a fixed and from a mobility perspective and also alongside our partners. So it’s been a very, very busy time for our customers and for ourselves.

And what problems did you face?

So like many, our office-based colleagues and employees. We had to basically become remote, and remote workers overnight.

Luckily though, we had prepared for this and we’d done a test day the week before. And also, we’d gone on the smart working journey a number of years ago, and I’m sure you’ve already seen that from us previously.

So we’d done the test. We upgraded the network remotely to support our customers, and many of our business customers had to deal with this as a completely new reality for them, for the first time.

So, mobility, broadband, and security were key fixtures in our conversations with them over that first period. To ensure we continued to deliver to our customers, we also had to move our partner’s channels, and what I mean by that, Ronan is, we have a huge inside sales team.

We also have feet on the street and we have field-based sales and account management experts that we had to remove very quickly to work remotely, and work from their home to help to support our customers, and be there to answer the call, answer our customers’ call.

Whether they were looking for a new solution or help because they needed to move from their premises to home as well. So, we were able to do that quite quickly, so that we had no downtime and we were able to actually continue to manage those calls, advise our customers, and give them the solutions they needed. So, it was a seamless transition, and obviously, our technology helped us to do that.

Because I noticed a while ago, you had a slight problem when your network went down for a while, but to me, when you’re in a pandemic, that’s going to happen regardless, so people have got to realise that, because of what’s going on right now, there’s going to be issues now and again, that happen.

Absolutely. There was a slight outage. We had a full resilient backup plan there, and there was a couple of hours that I think you’re alluding to. We have a resilient plan, we continue to invest in the network as we go forward.

We are currently experiencing interruptions on some of our data services. Our technical teams are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

— Vodafone Ireland (@VodafoneIreland) November 27, 2020

Yeah, and Lisa I think basically, during the pandemic when these things happen, customers have got to be more understanding with SMEs. Because of what’s going on right now, they can think well, because of what’s going on in the pandemic, it can happen.

Well, you bring me on to the next piece really Ronan, which is, “What problems have they faced? And how have they managed that?” So, besides the obvious that they’ve seen in terms of the business closures, loss of revenues, they’ve really been forced to actually adapt, and be agile quite quickly, so they’ve had to seek out advice and solutions that have helped them.

It’s been at speed, so, it probably hasn’t been pitch-perfect for them. They’ve had to seek advice as well, from a number of different organisations, and we want to, as I said to you, in terms of SME champion, we want to be that champion for them. We want to help them with that ICT advice in the future.

The connectivity and the ICT advice. The customers, for what we saw, the problems they faced immediately were mobility, security, fixed. Some needed advice around how they were protected from a mobile perspective. And some needed to just pivot in terms of their digital transformation, to online, and to E-commerce.

At the beginning of the lockdown we also saw, because it all happened so quickly, we had to adapt ourselves as well to make sure that our teams developed an empathetic approach to our customers.

Because we didn’t know which types of customers, at that very beginning stage, or which verticals, or which sectors were impacted the most. So we needed to make that we handled the call empathetically, and helped the customer to get to what they wanted.

The other thing that we saw as well, in terms of the problems that they had is, they moved from their own fixed premises to working from home, and they were also quite nervous because their families were at home.

They were quite nervous around moving from the fixed infrastructure that they had in some of their offices, if they had an office setup, to their home.

They wanted to make sure that they felt safe for their family, bringing somebody in from an external perspective to actually install broadband, or to deliver a new solution, a broadband background which we’d given to them.

So, my team have worked really, really hard with so many SMEs to support their digital transformation programs, and to improve their ability and their digital capability throughout COVID, and also to future proof, their business

Yeah. Because I’m guessing Lisa that when they’re doing this, they’re always thinking, “What will it cost us?”

Yeah, absolutely. Cost has been one of the key drivers for SMEs. Over the last nine months, we’ve really worked hard to make sure that it’s easy for them to access information, and solutions, that are also cost-effective for them.

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