Orange to cut 450 jobs

[Guest Dark Horse]

Orange to cut 450 jobs.

"Orange UK, the French-owned mobile operator, is to cut up to 450 management and administration jobs across the country as new chief executive Tom Alexander launches his strategy for the business.

Alexander - who made £6 million when Virgin Mobile, which he founded, was bought by NTL - said he wanted to shift the focus of the business to customers and grow its High Street presence.

He plans to add 60 Orange stores to the current 338, and eventually to pull out of Indian call centres. These moves should create around 500 what he called front-line jobs.

Alexander also announced a boardroom shake-up, which he said was "designed to stop duplication within the organisation and ensure we are agile and able to deliver and react quickly to customer needs".

Orange will build an extra 450 masts to fill in gaps on its 2G network while accelerating the roll-out of its 3G network, bringing faster mobile TV and internet to its customers more quickly."

In short, what he's saying is what we've known all along, Indian call centres are crap and that if you have a good, reliable operation, you wouldn't need to call customer service in the first place. Don't know about this half baked idea to increase Orange retail shops though, there's plenty of them around and they might wanna try ensuring the existing shops actually have staff who know what they're talking about first instead of marketing the brand.

The closure of the Indian call centres is a welcome step in the right direction, lets hope they follow this up by ditching the wretched Orange animal tariffs and stop trying to segment their customers based upon profiling.

Regards,

Dark Horse

[Guest Confucious]

Maybe they'll start doing reasonable data plans too - or is that only on the flying pig animal package?

[Guest hotphil]

Perhaps the penny's dropped?

If I were him though I'd forget about a focus on mobile TV - does anyone actually use it? And rather than more shops, how about enough staff in the existing ones? My local one has a dreary oppressive feel that even the fishtank fails to alleviate and you're usually waiting for 45 mins+ to speak to anyone.

[Guest awarner (MVP)]

Lets hope the stores get more motivated as well nothing worse than someone who is not really interested in selling you the product.

[Guest Confucious]

nothing worse than someone who is not really interested in selling you the product.

Apart from someone who is interested in selling you an Orange product?

[Guest Mark]

Perhaps they will re-introduce the coverage maps on the website, rather than that coverage prediction....

Orange were quite a good company to work for when I started 6 years ago (When I left 2 years ago it was bad, think its worse now!)

Now I live in an area where the coverage is useless so I don't even use them...