Virgin Money

Virgin Money were quick to recognise the impact of customer experience on competitive advantage and had operational aspirations to increase customer satisfaction, improve sales conversion and extend customer retention. We began by translating Virgin Money’s brand values into conversational behaviours that could be adopted in the contact centre and then analysed a batch of calls to identify conversational characteristics that delivered calls that met their desired outcomes.

We then worked with Virgin Money to design and implement a programme of change that would transform performance. This included the development of training initiatives to instil new conversational behaviours, a revision of the company’s recruitment criteria and technique and a new agent reward programme that linked bonuses to conversational quality.

Having identified the characteristics of good conversation and assisted with the implementation of change, we used the analytic output to develop an ongoing framework for assessing the quality of the Virgin calls and trained their onsite QA team in how to assess calls correctly.

We then ran a quarterly calibration programme for the next five years that externally validated their internal scoring and drove any changes in the evaluation form as their capability increased and the external market and competition varied over time.

We agreed at the outset with Virgin Money that a 0.5% increase in sales conversion rates would constitute success and that target was exceeded ten fold in the first six months. Their other key measure was retention of funds under management, which was increased by 10% at a time when clients were withdrawing funds due to poor stock market performance.