The first, the ‘Orange Accreditation for Certified Professionals’, provides customer services (call centres) and retail (Orange shop) employees with a professional qualification.
Orange is also celebrating its top performers in sales and service with the launch of the ‘Orange Customer Champion Awards’.
The initiatives are currently eligible to customer services and retail employees in almost all of Orange’s European countries. They illustrate Orange’s commitment to recognise the contribution these employees make in driving loyalty through customer services excellence.
Olaf Swantee, executive vice president in charge of the Group’s operations in Europe, commented: “At Orange, we understand that our people are fundamental to our success. As part of our Conquest 2015 plan, we are determined to invest, recognise and reward our people. These initiatives do just that and we believe that no one in the industry is doing anything like this on this scale.
“Our front-line people play a key role in delivering the Orange experience through customer relations excellence. As competition intensifies, we believe that the Orange customer experience will be differentiating and play an important role in our quest to become the best-loved operator.”
The Orange Accreditation for Certified Professionals provides sales and customer services employees alike with a professional qualification from Orange, that demonstrates internally and externally a standard of knowledge, experience and excellence in their field.
The accreditation recognises portfolio and tariff knowledge for example, as well as customer handling and brand advocacy among many other areas. Achievement of the accreditation will support career progression and set a benchmark for customer service and sales excellence across Orange markets. Employees have the opportunity to work towards two levels of accreditation, a first level with the aim that the majority of employees will achieve this, and the second level associated with a wider and deeper skill set that will be awarded to a select number of front-line employees.
Orange is also launching the first Orange Customer Champion Awards, a new international initiative to celebrate the top performers among customer-facing employees. The award is the largest employee reward and recognition scheme that Orange has ever organised and recognises both sales and customer service excellence. The scale of the awards underlines Orange’s ambition to set the industry benchmark for employee reward and recognition schemes and its determination to drive customer loyalty. The first awards recently took place, in which 220 ‘champions’ from across the globe were acknowledged for their outstanding achievements.
Both the ‘Orange Accreditation for Certified Professionals’ and the ‘Customer Champion Awards’ are part of a long-term commitment to recognise and reward excellence in Orange’s front-line employees. Orange intends to build on this by extending the initiatives across more Orange markets in 2011.