About us
Our Issues
Listening to our customers
When our customers talk, we listen. We actively invite feedback on our service, and welcome it, good or bad. It lets us know what's most important to our customers, helps us fix things if they go wrong and allows us to keep improving all the time.
That's why we've introduced a new feedback and measurement tool. It's called Net Promoter®.
It's simple really. Our customers are asked one simple question on how willing they'd be to recommend us to their friends and then to rank us, from 1-10. We also ask them to put in their own words what they think about us.
Over the last 6 months, around 200,000 customers have told us, in their own words, what they like and don't like about Virgin Media. We're using this information to develop our products and change the customer experience.
For example, it helped us identify the need to get rid of our 25p broadband technical support line which we'll be doing this year. It also provides a useful focus for training our front line teams to deliver the kind of outstanding customer service we strive for.
Net Promoter® has helped refine our understanding of our customers' experience and the various stages on their journey with us. You can see these in the table below.
We're focusing on identifying key 'touch-points' across the customer journey and using our Net Promoter® score to establish where we need to set ourselves targets and KPIs for improvement. We're researching these now and deciding which ones are going to help get the right feedback both for ourselves and our customers. This is an important area and we're really looking forward to telling you what we've put in place, next year.
This process is being closely monitored by a newly created Customer Board that provides 'end-to-end' ownership of our customer experience and management, and that will oversee the development of a new Customer Charter, enshrining our core commitments and responsibilities to the customer.
In the meantime, we wanted to give you a flavour of some of the issues (including those picked up through Net Promoter®) that are of most concern to us. Broadly speaking, our priorities this year revolve around one very important theme that will make a huge difference to the customer experience: Getting it right first time, every time.
Getting it right first time, every time
Here are three of the most important examples of the things this objective includes:
1. Making our products more reliable
Customers expect their products to work properly. Last year we set up a new team to make sure the products we install generate less reported faults. We've already put in place new tools to assist frontline staff to diagnose faults more easily, and established V+ specialists in our customer care team to sort out specific queries.
This year we'll be giving our product installers and service technicians new handheld devices so that they can work faster and smarter. We've also carried out a 12-week trial in North London to establish what constitutes a 'model' product installation. This involved looking specifically at the processes, systems and procedures in place for our field staff who are working directly with our customers. We're now setting about applying the valuable lessons we've learnt from the trial across our operations.
2. Giving customers the help they need, when they need it
Our customers want to get their queries resolved first time round when they contact us. For us, transferring a call should be the exception rather than the norm. We're constantly reviewing our policies, processes, call tree, website and the way we measure success within individual customer facing roles. We know that our customers need to get through to people who have the tools, skills, motivation and authority to help them.
We're also working more closely with our people in our offshore call centres to ensure our customers get the same experience no matter who they call. We recently ran an exchange scheme with our partners in IBM India called 'Trading Places' which proved to be a great learning experience, giving us both a great insight into how we all work. We're currently running a new training programme called 'Get Talking' which is designed to improve the interaction between customers and our offshore teams.
3. Getting things right, when things go wrong
We've reviewed our end-to-end complaint processes to ensure a speedy response and resolution, first time round. We've also changed the way we're organised to ensure that each team member is handling complaints that fall into an area where they're most knowledgeable, providing the best possible solution and an excellent outcome for the customer.
Virgin Media for all
We feel it's vital that everyone who wants to, is physically able to access and enjoy our services. We've made lots of progress in this area and we aim to continue to improve access in the future.
So far, we've significantly increased our capacity to provide audio description services for those with sight disability across all parts of our network.
We've also been working to improve and simplify the accessibility of subtitles provided by broadcasters, with work due for completion midway through 2008. In the online world, we are striving to meet all the requirements of the Web Accessibility Initiative - set out by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) to help develop strategies, guidelines, and resources to help make the web accessible to people with disabilities - as soon as possible.
Things that keep us up at night
There are a number of other complex issues relating to our business ethics that we need to properly understand if we are to act responsibly towards our customers. These are two examples of things that are keeping us awake at night and some things we've done about them:
1. Being totally transparent around all our costs
We want to make sure our customers are absolutely clear on all the things they pay for and that there are no surprises. All of our prices and terms and conditions are easily available on our website. Plus, our website contains an 'ask before you buy' section that gives customers the chance to ask our team any question they like on our products, pricing and terms conditions and get an answer instantly.
2. Ensuring responsible and accurate marketing and advertising
Like all Virgin companies, we're honest, up front and straight talking in our communications to customers. If you've seen any of our advertisements then you'll know what we mean. We also recognise that technology related marketing can easily lead to misinformation and inaccuracies, so we're keen to make sure we get things right. Our approach to advertising is captured in our 'Truth, Lies and Broadband' campaign which explained some of the differences in technology in a simple and straightforward way to help people understand the choices available. Our more recent 'Hate to Wait' campaign follows in a similar vein.
