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Customer: Virgin Media |
TOA Technologies: Delivering Dramatic Enhancements to Improve Net Promoter Scores
With nearly 3.4 million customers, Virgin Media is the largest residential broadband provider, and the second largest home phone and pay television provider, in the UK. In May 2009, Virgin Media selected TOA Technologies’ ETAdirect solution to manage over 1,200 field engineers responsible for home repairs and installations.
What business problem did Virgin Media want to solve?
Virgin Media is a company focused on customer satisfaction and loyalty, and for many years has instilled a customer-centric focus within its organization. In fact, Virgin Media was an early adopter of utilising Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is a loyalty metric and a discipline for using customer feedback to fuel
profitable growth.
As part of their recent transformation, Virgin Media sought to introduce more efficient and accurate management of its field force through better visibility and accurate scheduling of engineer visits, with an ultimate goal of improving customer satisfaction by narrowing customer appointment windows down to 1 – 2 hours. Virgin Media required a solution that would support a variety of workflows, including installation and ongoing service for consumers, operation and maintenance of the network from head ends out to customer homes, and support of field operations centres.
However, with their customer-centric approach, Virgin Media required a system that would not only optimise installer use – but do so with the customer in mind. When evaluating the ETAdirect solution, Virgin Media needed a partner that would help them improve back-office efficiencies, including scheduling and routing, but also help them deliver “what the customer wanted and when they wanted it,“ in terms of choosing timeslots that were most convenient. Finally, they wanted a tool to that would allow their field engineers to focus on the customer, not on the process of managing their daily workflow.
Why did Virgin Media choose TOA Technologies’ ETAdirect?
TOA was selected because its customer-centric solution would support Virgin Media’s goal of being recognized as the market leader in customer satisfaction. Plus, TOA&rsquos;s SaaS solution was selected because of its flexibility and ability to adapt to future needs of the business. In just six months, TOA was able to manage a very complicated installation including merging multiple instances of the billing system into a single view and fully integrating with an existing mobility solution.
ETAdirect, TOA’s customer-centric SaaS solution, employs its industry leading, predictive, statistical engine which analyzes learned historical performance patterns, overlays skill set, job history and customer proximity to accurately predict the amount of time each engineer will take to complete an appointment and personalise his or her schedule accordingly. The TOA solution combines a unique, predictive view of the field with the fastest scheduling engine on the market. Virgin Media dispatchers can now compile field workforce schedules in minutes before the start of the workday, rather than hours, as well as quickly respond to normal day-to-day changes during the workday. The end result is a more efficient mobile workforce and higher customer satisfaction.
What was Virgin Media’s process to select the best partner?
Virgin Media conducted an RFP process to evaluate the capabilities, experience and vision of several
companies. TOA Technologies was selected based on its abilities to deliver the project on time and with
the full scope.
What are the results?
Virgin Media has realised immediate results in key service, productivity and expense metrics since the
solution went live. ETAdirect has:
In addition to productivity enhancements and improved customer satisfaction, Virgin Media has also learned more about the way each engineer operates. ETAdirect allows Virgin Media to build schedules that match engineer skills with appointment types, and they are able to build schedules that more accurately reflect the time it takes individual engineers to complete different appointments. These improvements are increasing employee satisfaction, and delivering powerful insights about the field engineers back to the leadership team. “The TOA solution helps us to continue improving our customers’ experience and give us the scope to improve the working day of our technicians by giving them tighter routes with less travel time. We challenged TOA to integrate into our complex IT architecture and deploy across our large user base in record time and they have clearly delivered,” said Paul Buttery, Chief Customer and Networks Officer of Virgin Media.
Also, the dispatch team can now watch every route in real time on a monitor at the corporate office, and they can track every engineer on the road throughout the day to check their progress. By seeing the estimated arrival time for each route as the day goes on, the Operations Centre is able to make changes to schedules in real-time.
Moving forward, Virgin Media will move to a 2-hour wait window (or less) and improve their pre and post-appointment customer communications, while continuing to improve customer satisfaction ratings and their net promoter scores.
Click here to download the Virgin Media & TOA Technologies case study pdf.
