Internship at Vodafone in London
My internship lasted from the 11th of June to the 27th of June and took place at Vodafone, a mobile network operator based in London at Kingdom Street, 1. A mobile network operator is a telecommunications service provider organization that provides wireless voice and data communication for its subscribed mobile users. The four most important mobile network operators in the UK are Vodafone, EE – formerly T-Mobile and Orange – O2 and Three. In France we have for example Orange, SFR, Bouygues and Free.
Vodafone was created in 1982. Since then Vodafone became bigger and bigger and acquired new markets all over the world. In the year 1993 Vodafone had 1,000,000 customers. Then the evolution became faster. Only 10 years later Vodafone had 100,000,000 customers. Currently more than 400,000,000 people are customers of Vodafone. Now Vodafone is present in many countries not only in Europe (UK, Germany, Italy or Spain) but also in Africa (South Africa, Egypt, Ghana), in Asia (India, Turkey) and in Oceania (Australia, New Zealand). In all these countries they have subsidiariesthat are more or less independent. They are supervised by the Vodafone Headquarter. In 2018, Vodafone employed more than 111,000 people and is one of the largest mobile network operators in the world.
Vodafone, as all mobile network operators, has different products. They sell all types of phones like Apple, Samsung, Huawei and other brands. But they also sell SIM-only deals, i.e. SIM cards soldwithout a phone. With these you acquire a mobile contract which enables you to call someone, send messages and have data. Another product is what is called Internet of Things (IoT). These products are connected objects like a dog-tracker or a bag-tracker. Finally you have also the broadband, i.e. a box connecting you to Wi-Fi at home.
I did my internship at the Vodafone Headquarter near Paddington station. The Vodafone HQ is on Kingdom Street. It is in a big building, but only 3 floors (5, 6 and 7) are belonging to Vodafone. The other floors are used by other companies, such as Equinoor, the former Statoil. The CEO of Vodafone works on the 5th floor, like the other important people of Vodafone. My internship supervisor was the CEO of the AMAP countries (Africa, Middle-East, Asia-Pacific), Vivek Badrinath. He is supervising a group of people who are taking care of all the countries of the regions he is in charge of. He works also on the 5th floor. The 5th floor has a limited access and only people with a special pass can access to it. The two other floors are used by all other work groups. On the 7th floor is the cafeteria where the employees can take their lunch. All three floors are based on the same principle of open space. Only the CEOs have special rooms where they can organize conferences with their teams. No body has an assigned working place and everyone can sit wherever he wants, even if people stay always in the same area.
Employees at Vodafone have a relative freedom in the organization of their daily work. They can work one day from home if they inform their manager. They usually work from between 8 and 9AM to 5PM. On Fridays most of the people leave a bit earlier, around 4PM. Besides that, all employees have a lunch pause which can be taken at any time.
During my two and a half weeks I worked on different things. The first week I more or less discoveredthe company. The second week I worked on Excel statistics and the last half week I worked on a project for the end of my internship.
The first day I discovered the Vodafone building and I did some research on Vodafone and its competitors in the UK. Then I compared with The French and German market. My work was facilitated by the fact that I could look at French and German sites without language problems. I learnt also about Vodafone’s website and compared it with the sites of the other operators. Then I had to tellwhat I thought a site should be and what makes it nice and simple. It was also the day I met OguguaOsakwe Adegbite, who helped me a lot during my internship. She guided me the first week and she helped me to finish my presentation and make it look good.
The second day I did a tour in London and visited different types of Vodafone stores. First I visited a simple store in the King’s Mall in Hammersmith. It was very interesting to discuss with the employees in the stores and to know what happens behind the desk. Then I went to the Vodafone flagship store in Westfield. A flagship store is the biggest store of a company. It represents the brand, in this case Vodafone. Most of the big companies have flagship stores. It can be Vodafone but also Louis Vuitton or Chanel. They are the showcase of a brand. The last shop I went to was the one in Harrods, which is sort of a British Galeries Lafayette. At Harrods Vodafone has only a franchise but it’s also considered as a high value store. Here they sell things that are sold in no other Vodafone store: golden numbers, i.e. special numbers that are created on request.
On Wednesday and Thursday I was on the TechXLR8, a forum for new technologies. I learned a lot about the use of modern technologies in different sectors such as medicine or finance.
On Friday I learned how Vodafone organizes videoconferences. They use a system called appear.in: you can invite different groups of people in the conference. In those conferences they discuss many things often in detail and it’s important that everybody participates for a good result.
During the second week I worked with Giorgio Spagnuolo on recording all the results of the past year. I learned how to better use Excel and I created some graphics with the TNPS (Transactional Net Promoter Score) results. The TNPS is a way to calculate the customer satisfaction through surveys, asking customers on a scale from 0 to 10 if they want to promote Vodafone. People with an answer between 0 and 6 are called detractors, people between 7 and 8 are passive and people between 9 and 10 are called promoters. The TNPS is the number of promoters minus the number of detractors and the result is divided by the total number of customers. The best possible score is 100% and the worst is -100%. After doing those graphs, I did some research to understand why sometimes the TNPS went up or down. First I did the global TNPS but then I also worked on specific TNPS like digital TNPS and I compared the results with the targets. The last day of the week I had to put all the targets in an Excel document.
During the last three days I worked on totally different things. First I worked on my final presentation:I had to think about the best mobile contract for young people. I had to answer the four Ps: Product, place, price and promotion. The product is what you are going to sell. The place is where or how you are going to sell it. The price is how much it will cost and the promotion is how you are going to notify the people you want to sell it to. Besides I worked on artificial intelligence and on chatbots. This information helped me to do my presentation because I could elaborate a way to sell it. Finally I worked also on M-Pesa. M-Pesa is a digital way of payment. It is largely developed in African countries and was launched by Vodafone. The last day of my internship I did my presentation which has been seen by my internship supervisor.
It was a great experience to do this internship. I could learn many things: on how a big company works but also about telecom, a sector that I didn’t really know before this internship. The internship helped me also to improve my English skills and it was great to meet people coming from all over the world. In fact, Vodafone is a really international company: I worked with a Nigerian, an Italian and an Indian. I must say that the beginning was really hard because people were talking very fast and not always with an easy to understand accent. That’s why it was very important to prepare mentally to the fact that you will have to have to speak English during three weeks.