Virgin Media Implements Confirmit EFM to Maximize Customer Acquisition and Retention
September 05, 2007
Confirmit, a provider of software for Market Research (MR) and Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) has announced that it has successfully implemented Confirmit EFM for Virgin Media. Confirmit was selected by Virgin Media as part of its strategy to maximize customer acquisition and retention in the highly competitive UK ISP market place.
With this implementation, Confirmit enables Virgin Media to obtain invaluable customer feedback about its products and services and to monitor the effectiveness of its contact center agents during each customer interaction.
Virgin Media handles roughly 4,000 calls each day from both new and existing customers. These individuals are generally inquiring about non-cable broadband services through an outsourced call center facility. The quality of both inbound and outbound calls must be of the highest standard in order to maximize customer satisfaction.
"We were looking for a system that would allow us to capture agent and channel performance," says Oren Maor, head of telesales and retentions for Virgin Media's non-cable division, in a Wednesday statement.
"We wanted to be able to analyze agent performance by monitoring conversion and retention rates by channel. We turned to Confirmit as the only solution capable of capturing and tracking all the information we sought, including the ability to record resolution codes whilst agents were speaking to customers."
Confirmit was asked to create two systems: a customer acquisition system to track all calls relating to new accounts; and a customer retention system to enable the company to monitor problem resolution and track retention rates more effectively.
With the customer acquisition system, the outsourced call center agents are able to request and capture data regarding where each inbound call has come from, the reason for the call and the end result – whether the customer did or did not take on the service.
Agents are also able to capture customer attitude to help them understand why customers fail to take up a particular service if that is the result of the call. All captured data is fed directly to Virgin Media’s information management team to facilitate daily, weekly and monthly performance monitoring and trend/change analysis.
With the customer retention system, the company is able to monitor problem resolution and track retention rates more effectively. The system also allows for close monitoring of the performance of agents managing inbound calls from customers wishing to terminate their service. The result codes and the reasons behind a customer’s decision to close an account are recorded and fed through to the management team in trend reports.
"The Confirmit system has proved to be a very useful tool for our business," added Maor. "It has not only helped us to understand the performance of our promotions but has also helped us to identify training requirements for our outsourced call centre agents."
"We are able to monitor specific reasons behind a customer's decision to leave us and make changes in order to minimize the impact, whether it [be] changes to our product portfolio or pricing to counteract a competitor offer, for example. We have experienced a significant improvement in churn in the first months of using the system and Confirmit has played a vital role in this increase in performance," Maor concluded.
Understanding the cues from customers pertaining to acquisition and retention are essential to the success of the organization, as well as the contact center. By fully understanding why a customer does or does not take a service offering can help the center and the organization to understand whether it is a contact center issue, a product issue or something outside of the organization itself.
With this information, the organization can improve customer service processes in the contact center and better design its product offerings to meet the overall needs of its customer. Such a strategy will better position the company for growth, while also protecting the customer base.
