What’s Vodafone Germany’s Love Like?

We take a close and personal look at Vodafone Germany’s CRM marketing approach - Check how they score against other brands we graded so far

Adebisi Adewusi

April 21, 2022

Vodafone Germany is a German subsidiary of Vodafone Group plc. It provides mobile phone, DSL, LTE, cable internet, landlines, cable TV, and IPTV services to customers in Germany.

Let’s see how well the company treats its customers.

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Be Transparent 10/10

Vodafone Germany discloses information about its internal operations. We found a news story about Vodafone Germany naming Tanja Richter as its Chief Networks Officer. On the company’s newsroom page, we found recent articles about Vodafone Germany’s activities including its efforts toward supporting Ukraine. Scrolling to the bottom of the company’s homepage, we discovered links to pages on climate protection, sustainability, and diversity.

Transparency remains important to building trust as customers actively look for insights into a company before buying from them. Thumbs up to Vodafone Germany for sharing information about its internal activities.

Perks and Incentives 10/10

Vodafone Germany dishes out freebies and discounts that are certain to give customers value for their money. Here’s what we got from the company’s website as first-time visitors.

100 GB data volume and up to 30% discount

A discount of up to €15 every month and extra data volume for on the go

Giga deals for phones

And lots more!

We like how the company communicated its incentives and perks early in the customer journey. For helping customers save money, Vodafone Germany gets a 10.

Be Relevant 10/10

Providing customers with relevant services and products helps companies to build a strong relationship with customers. Let’s have a look at how Vodafone Germany does here.

GigaTV Cable provides customers with variety of entertaining programs including Netflix.

Curve tracker is a smart device that helps track keys, pets or bags.

Neo smart kids is a smartwatch for kids with features like a camera, activity tracker that help children stay in touch with their parents.

Curve bicycle light tracker provides smart protection for bikes.

Vodafone Germany does a great job of providing relevant products and services to its customers.

Be Helpful 10/10

Today’s customers expect charitable initiatives from the brands they choose to support. For this commandment, we check to see whether a company has been giving back.

Vodafone Germany made a donation payment of 56,000 euros to 20 nationwide aid organizations. To support Ukraine, Vodafone has donated over 400,000 euros in donations to help refugees from Ukraine. The Vodafone Foundation is providing 500,000 euros in emergency aid to local aid organizations and the UN refugee agency.

Telephone calls and text messages from the German Vodafone network to Ukraine continue to be free for Vodafone customers. And there’re no roaming charges for customers currently in Ukraine.

We score Vodafone Germany 10/10 for its philanthropic efforts.

Realtime personalization 4/10

At PostFunnel, we’re all about real-time personalization. So, we’re eager to see how Vodafone Germany does here. Vodafone Germany’s website is automatically in German. We were only able to navigate the website with the help of Google Translate.

Vodafone Germany could easily have offered us some real-time website personalization here by changing the language and other content on the site based on our locale or region.

To test Vodafone Germany’s real-time personalization strategy, we placed an iPhone in our cart. Sadly, Vodafone Germany didn’t personalize the images, messaging, or content on the site to give us a customized shopping experience.

For upselling and cross-selling, we were offered some accessories to go with our iPhone.

After leaving the site, we weren’t tailed with ads on social media or on the internet.

In all, Vodafone Germany didn’t offer us a real-time personalized experience. For instance, we spent a lot of time looking at phones. Vodafone Germany could have used our site behavior to send us personalized content throughout our customer journey. Vodafone Germany loses some points for not offering customers a real-time personalized shopping experience.

Master UX 4/10

Navigating Vodafone Germany’s website was not a very smooth experience. While we could navigate the website, it was difficult to find the ‘add to cart button’. This hasn’t been our experience with other websites we’ve visited in the 7 CRM series.

The product page had descriptions but no user reviews and ratings. This made it difficult for us to determine which product suited our needs. Vodafone Germany’s FAQ page covers a broad range of issues and answers many relevant questions.

In all, Vodafone Germany’s website UX performance is below average compared to other sites we’ve analyzed. We recommend Vodafone Germany follows UX best practices to improve its website.

Leverage Social Media 8/10

Vodafone Germany has a presence on social media with nearly 70K followers on Instagram, 1.3 million likes on Facebook and 86K followers on Twitter.

Vodafone Germany’s posts on Facebook are mostly, promotional with links to blog posts about the company’s entertainment services. We’d like to see the brand use more Facebook features to drive engagement.

The company’s Instagram feed is filled with promotional posts, quizzes, and witty content.

Vodafone Germany posts regularly on Twitter, and we noticed the company promotes content related to Giga TV.

In all, Vodafone Germany does a decent job of being active on social media but we think the company’s social media strategy could use some creativity to drive engagement.

Time for Vodafone Germany’s CRM health check.

Overall, Vodafone Germany is getting 54/70 here (77%). Vodafone Germany needs to fix its real-time personalization and UX to improve its customer relationship.

We recommend Vodafone Germany adopts real-time personalization to generate personalized customer communications. One way to do this is by capturing data for known and anonymous web visitors and using it to optimize its site and content. Find out more about website realtime personalization here.

We hope Vodafone Germany takes our CRM improvement tips and gives customers the real-time 1:1 experience they deserve.