The Brand

True to our brand promise, The Future is Exciting. Ready?, we have embarked on a journey to inspire everyone in Qatar to live a better today and build a better tomorrow with technology. Our ambition is to be the digital partner that drives innovation in Qatar and empowers local communities to progress and prosper.

A. Realising the power of 5G

In August, we put Vodafone’s brand promise to the test when we switched our first, live 5G network and connected the first customer in Qatar to 5G. Our ongoing commitment to building world-class digital infrastructure is fuelling the transformative potential of 5G to improve how we live and work in Qatar, enabling us to become one of the world’s most digitally connected countries.

B. World-class partnerships

Our brand awareness and reputation has grown through our partnerships with other world-class Qatari brands. This year we announced an exciting partnership with Qatar Airways to offer all our Red Postpaid customers an easy way to earn Qmiles and enjoy a range of exclusive travel benefits. Our Red portfolio offers the most comprehensive and worry-free mobile Postpaid plans in the country. By partnering with Qatar Airlines and others, we can deliver even more exciting benefits to customers and expand our brand reach.

C. Leveraging platforms

We succeeded to enhance brand loyalty and engagement by leveraging our platforms as well. This year we relaunched the Flex platform, inviting Post and Prepaid Flex customers to “Flex like a boss” and stay in control of their plan allowances. The campaign reflects Vodafone’s attitude and commitment to give customers the flexibility to control their own spend. Customers could earn more Flex through local partners such as Baladna, with the chance to become Flex Millionaires.

D. Engaging on social media

We ramped up our social media activity with targeted campaigns across the most popular social platforms in Qatar. Content has helped to digitise the brand by showcasing our revolutionary investments in innovation and technology and our digital-first approach. These campaigns resulted in greater real-time engagement with customers around their passion-points and interests.

E. “Glocal” reputation

Overall our 2018 initiatives have helped to root Vodafone the brand locally in Qatar and build on our global distinction for innovation. This “glocal” reputation is clearly helping to propel our success. As we look forward to 2019, we are boldly optimistic about the future and genuinely excited about the role Vodafone is playing to ignite Qatar’s digital agenda.

Getting closer to our Customers

New Stores

Leading in retail for us means efficiently expanding our footprint to be closer to our customers and strategically present in top destinations across the country. Today, we have 30 retail stores across Qatar, two of which recently opened in Tawar Mall and Mansoura.

Our new stores take customers on a branded journey where they experience the convenience, transparency, simplicity and speed of business with Vodafone. We significantly improved features in our store model to deliver the best possible advice and service to customers.

We have also empowered our retail agents with a centralised platform that provides a 360° view of customer information. The platform has improved the seamless delivery of service, while protecting customer data and privacy.

Postpaid services

We have expanded our distribution by offering postpaid sales in 150 mass-market outlets, strategically spread across Qatar where we lack a retail footprint or competitive presence. In 400 mass outlets, we have also launched bill payment capabilities for postpaid accounts. This expansion is a win-win for customers who now get better access to Vodafone services and for dealers who now have more business with Vodafone.

Delivering everyday great value that fits in your pocket.

Innovation Through Responsible Analytics

Vodafone Qatar is committed to making customer lives better using advanced analytics. With best-in-class data science tools and leading data scientists, we realised exciting new channels and enhanced the customer experience.

These developments have reinforced our reputation for deeply understanding customer needs and responding with innovative offers and superior service. Our cutting- edge analytics and robustly tested processes are proving essential to these achievements.

As we expand our analytics capabilities, we take data security and confidentiality very seriously. With best-in-class systems and highly skilled experts, Vodafone Qatar meets and often exceeds our obligations to protect and secure customer data.

We Care

Customer experience has become a critical differentiator in today’s competitive global marketplace. With our CARE customer experience strategy, we are enhancing the customer experience to deliver tangible business advantage.

With CARE, we ensure that customers are Confidently connected, Always receive excellent value, Rewarded for their loyalty and Easily access support.

The programme is key to offer the most engaging digital experience to customers, blending the digital and physical assets of Vodafone with personal, instant and easy service. By making use of more advanced digital technologies, CARE is contributing towards incremental growth in revenues while reducing net operating costs on an organic basis.

C – Connectivity

Vodafone connects people, places and things in ways people could never imagine before. Discover how we Confidently connected customers in 2018.

Best Network

According to CRA QoS Audit Report issued in July 2018, we achieved the fastest average data throughput for local data (172 Mbps for download and 47 Mbps for uploads). On voice, Vodafone Qatar had the fastest call set-up time of 3.44 seconds and best voice quality with a 100 % rate for call completion.

5G

We switched on our first, live 5G network in August and connected the first customer in Qatar to 5G.

Roaming

We expanded the Vodafone Passport Pack to include China, increasing our roaming countries to 104.

Advance Flex

We launched a new service that allows Flex customers to remain connected even after they run out Flex credit.

Ncell Network

We partnered with Ncell in Nepal to enable customers with international minutes to connect with family and friends on the Ncell network.

A - Always excellent value

Delivering exceptional customer value, both in consumer and enterprise segments, is core to our success in Qatar. Discover how customers Always received excellent value in 2018.

 

Valuing time

  • We launched newly designed queuing machines in our flagship stores that will soon be available in all our locations.
  • We realised a 12 per cent increase in the resolution of tickets within a 24-hour period.
  • Customers can now make transactions faster with a self-service menu in stores that use interactive voice response (IVR).

Valuing service

  • Subscribers to our premium and VIP service attested to the superior service they received in Customer Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and Voice of the Customer initiatives.
  • Fixed customers received a broadband upgrade in The Pearl, including a 20 per cent discount on mobile broadband unlimited plans and a Huawei Mifi device with mobile broadband 250 or above plans.

Valuing price

  • We launched the “Flex like a Boss” campaign to promote our Flex Plan that offers customers total control of their spending on data, calls and SMS. Other Flex benefits include the ability to carry forward unused Flex, never exceed their plan limit, free calls between numbers on the same Vodafone account, free data for six months and much more.
  • Customers earned Flex credit through local partners such as Baladna, with the chance to become “Flex Millionaires”.
  • We released daily offers for free minutes, discounted rates and recharges. Offers included reduced handset prices for iPhone, Nokia and Samsung along with a 10 per cent discount on accessories.

R - Rewarding loyalty

We work hard to develop relationships with customers, appreciating them for choosing Vodafone and continuously reaffirming this decision with rewards. Discover how we Rewarded customer loyalty in 2018.

 

Travel more with Red and Qmiles

We partnered with Qatar Airways Privilege Club to offer all Red Postpaid customers an easy way to earn Qmiles and enjoy a range of exclusive travel benefits.

Personalised offers

Postpaid customers received a range of personalised offers for Flex credit, data, international and local minutes through our Postpaid NBA programme.

Win like a boss

Prepaid customers could win up to QR 5,000 each – like a boss – with this first of its kind promotion.

Valet parking

New RED 500 customers received free valet parking for 12 months at our stores.

E - Easily access support

Customers expect efficient service and the latest technology solutions from Vodafone. Discover how customers Easily accessed support in 2018.

 

eSIM

Customers can now connect to the network without using a physical SIM card, allowing for seamless switching of personal and business numbers.

Add-ons

Customers can easily activate and deactivate add-ons using the My Vodafone App without having to contact the call centre or visit a store.

Bill payment by App

This in-store campaign educated customers about the benefits of making payments using the My Vodafone App.

Bill payment by App

The My Vodafone App now accepts debit cards as a payment method.

Enabling customers to perform better


We are relentlessly focused on enabling businesses to succeed in a changing digital world. In 2018, we pushed ourselves further with major investments in our networks and IT systems that showed just how “exciting” business with Vodafone can be.

Launched 5G

Launched 5G to propel Qatar’s economic growth and give businesses access to the latest 5G technology. We are proud to have had the privilege to be the first operator in Qatar to connect an enterprise customer to the 5G network.

Expanded our fibre network

Expanded our fibre network to new footprints, thus reaching more customers and allowing them to connect their people, places and things through our resilient & secure network.

Modernised our Voice Core Network

Modernised our Voice Core Network to improve voice quality and reliability for customers with our cloud infrastructure.

Invested in App infrastructure

Invested in App infrastructure to communicate with and service customers more efficiently and dynamically.

Cyber Security

We take our cyber security responsibilities very seriously, adopting an active defence against the increasing volume and diversity of threats. We protect customer and employee data and privacy with proactive measures that identify and mitigate threats. Any breaches are treated according to law.

Industry trends show that Distributed Denial of Service attacks, known as DDoS, are on the rise. In response, we launched a new DDoS mitigation service this year to better protect enterprises from this emerging threat. The service proactively mitigates DDoS risks before attackers can harm a customer’s network.

Investing in IT infrastructure

We swapped and modernised our mediation stack, reducing the processing time of Call Detail Records (CDR) from eight hours to less than two minutes. This hugely improved call centre handling and increased first call resolution by almost 20 per cent. We made many other exciting improvements to our IT infrastructure as well.

  • Digital layer for digital channels that increased the capacity of the My Vodafone App by seven times and enhanced performance by 50 per cent.
  • Customer Relation Management (CRM) system on PCs and tablets for all call centre and retail stores, reducing handling times for customers.
  • Electronic Recharge Application to make it easier for Prepaid customers to recharge accounts digitally. This included vouchers and roll-out in 1,000 plus locations for the mass market, distributors and dealers.

Modernising the network

Vodafone customers in Qatar today enjoy one of the best voice and data services in the world. This is a direct result of our QAR 1 billion investment in innovation and technology. Since we began in 2009, we have relentlessly sought to modernise our network. This year was no exception.

Introduced 5G

We were among the first to introduce live 5G service in Qatar and the region. We expect to be among the first operators to bring 5G to all commercial customers by the end of 2018.

CRA audit report

Our status as a world-class operator is reflected in the 2017 independent audit by the Communications Regulatory Authority (CRA) in Qatar. The audit ranked us first on local data with the best speeds achieved for average downloads of 172 Mbps and uploads of 47 Mbps. On voice, Vodafone Qatar has the fastest call set-up time of 3.44 seconds and best voice quality with a 100 per cent rate for call completion. Our world-class network has achieved similar recognition from international industry associations, including GSMA.

Network availability

Our mobile and fixed network availability is consistently ranked nearly 100 per cent above all other Vodafone networks in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Our investments in 2018 brought even greater resilience and reliability to our network.

Providing more to enterprise customers

As a customer-centric company, we put our customers’ needs at the forefront of our operations. The milestones we achieved in 2018 demonstrate this customer-centric commitment.

Enhanced our security products portfolio

Enhanced our security products portfolio with features to protect customer networks from congestion caused by cyber hackers and prevent attacks that deny genuine users from accessing their web services. We also added an enhanced security layer to protect customer applications from malicious cyber-attacks.

Developed our call centre services

Developed our call centre services by introducing a digital knowledge database. When coupled with an improved customer telephony system, this database enables our frontline teams to provide customers with a world-class experience. Today, Vodafone Qatar leads in several customer-care performance indicators in the region.

Enriched our total telecoms proposition

Enriched our total telecoms proposition with a customer-centric approach that puts customer needs at the forefront and provides a suite of tailored services beyond core connectivity.
We beat our last year’s all-time-low mobility churn by improving our quality-first acquisition strategy, coupled with our improved incentive scheme, both delivering high quality customers resulting in consistent revenues.

Our People and Culture

Our people are behind every aspect and success of our company strategy. Together, we are committed to delivering superior network performance, outstanding customer experience and contributing to the Qatar National Vision 2030.

The Vodafone Way underpins our culture and purpose. At its centre is a focus on three core principles: speed, simplicity and trust. We want our people to respond swiftly and effectively to challenges and opportunities, especially those that affect our customers. Avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy and costly and cumbersome internal processes is a priority. Our culture ensures business activities and decisions recognise the importance of earning and retaining the trust of our customers, employees and stakeholders.

Our leaders foster a culture where communication, team work and trust come together to unleash greatness. We strongly believe that this culture will drive innovation and create the better today and tomorrow we seek for our employees and customers.

Attracting and developing great people

In the last year, we have significantly increased the opportunities we provide to young people to experience work at Vodafone consistent with the Qatar National Vision. We have also made strides to “Qatarise” more employee roles with Qatari citizens going forward and have increased the number of Qatari’s in the company.

In the last year, we have significantly increased the opportunities we provide to young people to experience work at Vodafone consistent with the Qatar National Vision. We have also made strides to “Qatarise” more employee roles with Qatari citizens going forward and have increased the number of Qatari’s in the company.

We want the world’s top talent to choose Vodafone because of our reputation for investing in learning and development across the company. This year, we invested significantly in employee training and development. While these programmes take many forms, our core focus in 2018 was on developing agile leadership and digital management skills. Initiatives also empowered front-line staff with skills to improve the digital customer experience.

Recognising performance

We reward people based on their performance, potential and contribution to our values and success. To maintain compliance with our fair pay standards, we benchmark and monitor our pay practices on a regional and industry level. This ensures our pay practices, including retirement and other benefit provisions, are:

  • compliant with all local legislation
  • free from discrimination
  • market competitive
  • easily understood.

Global short-term incentive plans are offered to a large percentage of employees and senior managers are eligible for global long-term incentive plans. Our arrangements are subject to company and individual performance measures.

Creating a safe place to work

We want everyone working with Vodafone, including our partners and suppliers, to return home safely every day. This is why health and safety rules are fully integrated as a core value across Vodafone Qatar.

The management team makes health and safety a priority, visiting different locations on a quarterly basis to lead by example. Their presence has helped to establish our culture of health and safety and encouraged partners to rise to the same high standard.

Initiatives that support employee wellbeing are part of this culture. Activities in 2018 included football tournaments, the Wellbeing Challenge and Health and Safety Week. All have contributed to greater workplace engagement, motivation and productivity.