Case Study: Virgin Money

Virgin Money is a retail bank with a straightforward, transparent approach to business that helps to differentiate the company from its competitors. Launched as Virgin Direct in 1995 the company was successfully listed on the London Stock Exchange in November 2014. It provides savings, mortgages, credit cards, current accounts, pensions and investment and protection products to almost three million customers in the UK.

The challenge

On its first day of business 20 years ago the company handled 4,000 calls from customers and today its customer services operations have grown significantly across its 75 stores and contact centres.

Virgin Money has always understood the value of listening to its customers and in March 2012 the company began looking for a solution that would enable them to collect, analyse and act upon customer feedback. It chose NICE’s real-time Voice of the Customer (VoC) solution and a pilot was implemented in July of that year, which ran for 16 weeks. Following the success of the pilot, the solution was rolled out across the organisation in January 2013.

The solution

Today, any customer who visits a Virgin Money store, or calls its Gosforth contact centre will automatically receive a timely request for feedback via SMS or email, regarding their recent interaction experience with the bank, assuming they have provided appropriate contact details to do so.

Alex McDougall is the Customer Research Manager in the Customer Experience Team at Virgin Money: “By combining the footfall into our stores and the volumes of calls to our contact centre, the NICE VoC solution enables us to spread our net widely, giving a lot of customers the opportunity to share their experience with us.” Virgin Money is achieving very impressive response rates, with between 35% – 40% of customers who are invited to submit feedback choosing to offer it.

The NICE Voice of the Customer solution is ingrained in the day-to-day operations of Virgin Money through its powerful real-time dashboard, which gives in-store personnel, as well as contact centre team-leaders and managers, direct and regular access to the feedback customers are sharing. McDougall explains: “The dashboard is our bread and butter! It gives us crystal clear and real-time insight into what customers are thinking about us and their service experience, at a store, contact centre, and individual employee level.”

The real-time dashboard is used by teams to identify comments from customers that are glowing about their experience. McDougall adds: “In our daily team huddles we share these insights. They are great for morale and help us to understand what is working well, where we can be better, who our star performers are and what we can learn from them. The dashboard is also vital in tackling any negative feedback. If a customer is unhappy, or submits a low score for satisfaction, likelihood to recommend etc., an alert is raised in real-time, enabling the team to contact and engage with the customer to remedy the issue, if that is what they required.”

The benefits

Such is the importance of the feedback that Virgin Money is collecting through the NICE VoC solution that it is shared with the Executive Team on a weekly basis. “It is a great way for our Executive Team to obtain insight in to what our customers are saying about us.” McDougall adds: “Customer comments are also shared with colleagues across the business as part of our internal communications, which is great acknowledgement of everyone’s hard-work. What is more, it reinforces to everyone here at Virgin Money that delivering a great customer experience is at the very heart of what we do.”

Based on the volume and richness of feedback that Virgin Money now has access to, it has been able to realise significant benefits by measuring customer satisfaction scores and an increased likelihood to recommend the company, its products and services. McDougall concludes: “The NICE Voice of the Customer solution is well-embedded in the Virgin Money business, providing valuable real-time insights from our customers.”

Virgin Money is currently working with NICE Systems and has plans in place to solicit and obtain real-time feedback at other stages of the customer journey.