Vodafone — My Vodafone — Making self-service the confident default over the call centre

Context

Self-service at national scale

Vodafone serves hundreds of millions of customers across mobile, broadband, and IoT, and is pushing beyond connectivity into digital services and financial products.

I worked on the My Vodafone app and self-service journeys — the primary channel customers use to manage their account, resolve issues, and upgrade — at a scale where even small friction compounds into enormous call-centre cost.

Challenge

Flows confident enough to skip the phone call

Customers were falling back to calling or visiting a store for tasks the app was technically capable of handling — upgrades, billing disputes, plan changes. Every one of those fallbacks cost far more to service than a self-resolved app journey, and each one signalled the app hadn't earned enough trust to be the default.

The challenge was designing self-service flows confident enough that customers didn't feel the need to double-check with a human.

Approach & Process

Prioritising design by cost of friction

I mapped the full cross-channel journey — app, web, store, call centre — to find where customers were bouncing between channels rather than resolving in one. The clearest signal: customers abandoned self-service at the exact moment a flow asked them to make a decision without enough context (e.g. “which plan?” with no comparison in view). We redesigned those decision points first, prioritising by contact-centre volume so design effort mapped directly to cost reduction.

Every research output was distilled to one insight per slide — no raw transcripts, no sticky-note walls — so stakeholders across a large, matrixed organisation could act on it without a workshop debrief.

Impact

A measurable cost saving, felt by customers

Self-service completion rose across the redesigned journeys, and the corresponding call-centre contact rate for those same tasks dropped — a direct, measurable cost saving the business could point to, not just a usability improvement. App NPS moved in the same window, suggesting the shift was felt by customers, not just recorded in a dashboard.

Learnings & Reflection

Seniority is what you cut from the deck

At Vodafone's scale, a single flow touches millions of people and multiple internal teams with competing priorities. The design skill that mattered most wasn't the interface work — it was translating research into a one-sentence, one-number argument that a commercial stakeholder could act on in a five-minute meeting.

Reflection: seniority in a large organisation is as much about what you cut from a deck as what you put in a design file.