Vodafone · TMW Unlimited · AW 2025
The cure was making it worse.
Customer engagement across Vodafone's CRM base had fallen — not because they were doing too little, but because they were doing too much of the wrong thing. A quant and qual diagnostic cut through the noise and found the real problem: internal dysfunction driving a contact strategy that was actively eroding customer trust.
Strategy · Diagnosis · Research · CRM · Telecoms
THE STORY
Built on want, not need.
The situation
Customer engagement across Vodafone's CRM base had slumped — opens, responses, upgrades, retention. Every metric was moving in the wrong direction. The instinct from internal sales teams was predictable: send more. Contact harder. Push the product louder.
I was brought in through TMW Unlimited to run a diagnostic — qual and quant — to understand what was actually going on before anyone committed to a direction.
The insight
Vodafone wasn't disengaging their customers through neglect. They were disengaging them through overcontact. The CRM base was being bombarded — not with value, but with volume. And the cause wasn't rogue strategy. It was internal teams operating in silos, each taking orders from sales and firing independently, with no one coordinating the cumulative effect on the customer.
The problem beneath the problem
The diagnostic surfaced something the team already sensed but hadn't been able to name clearly: the relationship with customers was being actively damaged — not by a bad product or weak creative, but by a structural failure in how the organisation was deciding who to contact, when, and why.
Different internal teams were each receiving mandates from sales — "email more, push harder" — and executing independently. No one had sight of the full picture. No one was asking what the customer was actually experiencing. The result was a barrage that felt transactional, impersonal, and relentless. Customers were tuning out, and some were actively churning.
The real brief wasn't "improve engagement metrics." It was "stop breaking your own customer relationships."
The approach
The recommendation wasn't to do more — it was to do less, but with far more purpose. I developed a framework for rebuilding the contact strategy around customer value rather than sales volume: what does a customer actually need at each stage of their relationship with Vodafone, and how do you deliver that in a way that builds trust rather than eroding it?
Alongside this, I mapped the internal coordination failure and recommended guardrails — a new operating model for how teams aligned before contacting customers, so the left hand knew what the right hand was doing. Not a complex restructure, but a clear set of principles and sign-off mechanisms that prevented the silo problem from recurring.
The outcome