Customer focus
Delivering the best customer experience is at the heart of everything we do and customer satisfaction scores are seen as a key measure of our success.
We want to improve our performance continuously. We research the effectiveness of our communication, the public's perception of our brand, the service levels of our shops, online portal and customer care units, customer satisfaction in our products and services, and the quality of our network. From October 2004 to March 2005, O2 UK had the best call success rate of all UK operators. We believe this is a clear and independent indicator that enhanced customer focus is improving our performance.
The biggest challenge for our industry is to persuade customers not to migrate from one network provider to another. In common with all operators, we face this problem of 'churn'. For this reason, we focus our strategy on the whole customer experience and work to build customer loyalty.
We continue to develop a culture of 'customer-centricity' and we support this with Group-wide training and development. During the year, our customer base grew by 16 per cent to 24 million and about 34 per cent of our customer base are now using non-text mobile data services.
O2 UK launched the 30-day Challenge to encourage employees to think about initiatives that can improve our business. Among the resulting ideas, we now offer customers replacement products rather than cash on returned goods.
In the UK, we have announced plans to open more O2 stores. We are also introducing a more attractive range of services, better support, pricing deals and new ways to reward customer loyalty. One of these is to give back our Pay & Go® customers 10 per cent of their spend on topping up their phones every three months.
Not all our initiatives go to plan, so we try to move quickly to correct any mistakes. During the year, we experienced a teething problem with a large IT project to consolidate nine billing platforms onto one O2 system. A small number of customers, less than one per cent of the UK base, were affected by the problem in which they were not billed for some calls.
We quickly resolved the problem and, as a goodwill gesture, gave affected customers a 25 per cent discount on their next bill. In the UK we also launched several projects, including instant call back to customers with queries to help improve efficiency.
O2 applies checks to bills and the processes are regularly audited by an independent third party and overseen by the industry regulator. O2's billing accuracy is within industry standards and we have an approval under the regulator's monitoring scheme. The British Approvals Board for Telecommunications (BABT) has renewed O2's accreditation.
