Virgin Media launched their Net Promoter Program in 2007. Sean Risebrow, Director of Customer Experience at Virgin Media, is at the helm of the program, and he was at the conference to share their experiences and how they operationalised NPS the Virgin way. To date, they have collected 250,000 responses and are still actively collecting and taking actions driven by their customers' insights.

Who Is Virgin Media?
Virgin Media came into existence in 2007 as a result of a merger between Virgin Mobile, NTL and Telewest. Quadplay is the name of their game. To provide the context of the scale and complexity the program needed to achieve their goals and objectives, Sean asked the audience to think about the number of Virgin broadband customers that go through the sales process, installation, billing and how the cycle repeats when they move. Then think about the number of times these customers would call Virgin to talk about the problems that they are facing and finally think about the number of times customers would access their services throughout their relationship with Virgin. These figures rise at an exponential rate resulting in billions of customer interactions for the 14,000-strong organisation who is by far, the largest Virgin organisation in the world.

What Did They Measure and How?
Their goal was to develop a program that could continuously tune into the voice of the customer at an individual employee/customer level across the whole range of experiences. In-depth research has gone into helping Virgin Media identify the following significant customer journeys:

• Join
• Help
• Change
• Pay
• Use

To address the different nature of these journeys, Virgin decided to run both operational and relationship surveys. There are 26 versions of the operational survey alone to measure the "Join", "Help" and "Change" journeys. The core essence of the survey was maintained throughout the versions with variations to capture the different types of events and the different lengths of the survey. These were the 3 core questions they asked in the short version of the operational survey:

1. Would you recommend us?
2. Why have you given us the score?
3. Are you willing to provide us with more information?

Logic was built by Satmetrix into the survey to allow the answers to the third question to trigger the closure of the survey or the extension of the survey to capture further information unique to each journey. The quantitative nature of the additional insights helped to provide robust statistical measures of the relationship between each journey's touchpoints and the recommend score. Together with customers' verbatims from the second core question, Virgin was able to identify the key drivers of recommend and was able to diagnose areas that needed further improvements.

The other type of survey developed was a Relationship survey to capture their customers "Pay" and "Use" journeys and these followed the same design principle as the Operational survey.

What Have They Learned about Measuring and Rolling Out NPS?

• Tracking one meaningful number was the vehicle they used to focus the entire business around what matters most to their customers. NPS provides a single, simple measurement across the business that everybody understood, from the front lines to the CEO. Is it cost-effective? Yes it is. They spent 50% less to collect feedback but are getting more actionable insights for the investments made.
• "You cannot mobilize the whole organization unless you create a company-wide view". He believed that this was best achieved using a big bang approach, rolling it out across the business versus a phased approach. In total, they took only 19 weeks to launch the project across the whole of Virgin Media.
• Understand the significance of survey timings. Conscious of accurately capturing the true customer perception of the complete journey, Virgin looked at all their customer journeys and identified the appropriate events to trigger the survey to capture customers' perceptions of how well they kept their promises rather than the customers' perceptions of their initial promise. For example, if they asked the customer immediately after they have contacted Virgin to arrange for a "Move", they may not be accurately measuring the whole customer experience of moving house until the move has been completed.
• There is zero value in just the score alone. In the first 12 weeks they refused to release their NPS to the business, as they wanted their employees to focus on engaging with the customers and not just following the score. "The competitive advantage comes from what you do with the data".

"It's the promises we keep and not the ones we make that drive customer advocacy."

Let Customers Tell You in Their Own Words What Matters to Them
There will always be a small number of key drivers. People can become so focused on data that they stop hearing the real voice of the customer. This goes to the very heart of what Net Promoter is all about.

• Get the right things right
• Customers' expectations are reasonable
• Customer-facing groups and not central teams are the primary stakeholders of the Net Promoter data.
• There are 1-3 things that customer truly value

"The key is not to feel overwhelmed by customer data and think of them not from your perspective but from a front-line perspective". They went to each touch point owner and selected 10 comments from detractors to get them to focus on customer feedback. All their action plans were focused on reducing detractors. When they first started the program, they had the same number of customers who gave them a score of 0 as customers who gave them scores of 10. Today they have reduced the number of customers who gave them 0s by 30% but have grown significantly the number of promoters.

Everyone needed to see the impact of his or her interactions and decisions on the customer experience. They recognised that every single transaction was important to their customers and it needed to be equally important to them. Driving the voice of the customer to the frontlines meant that results were disseminated across the organisation and even managers took to working frontline jobs some part of the time. "If they are not working for the customers, they better be working for someone else who is."

Unleashing the Power of their People

Focusing thousands of employees on what mattered most to their customers meant shifting the focus from the mechanics of measure, publish and pay, to focusing on winning hearts and minds. They now have a "10" wall where they post comments from customers who gave them a Recommend score of "10," to share their strengths across the organisation.

For Virgin Media, it was all about the right data in the right hands in the right way at the right time. Everyone needed to know what they were accountable for and they provided dashboards that were relevant to each individual to drive actions. They were fortunate that the Virgin staff wanted to proactively do the right things. For example, a team leader from Manchester who shared with her colleagues in other regions the actions she took based on the insights.

"It is impossible to win the loyalty of customers without first winning the loyalty of our people."

Success Takes Time
Without action, any loyalty program is a waste of time. Virgin made a conscious decision to avoid focusing purely on the ultimate value of their data. Instead they recognised that the true value of the program came from the improvements they made across the business.

Their customers judge them from end to end, so it was important for them to keep a clear focus on the single most important thing for the customer, and get that right. This is about deciding how they allocate their investments to tackle the number one issue that the customer raised. Their definition of a successful team isn't the team who addressed the broad customer issue and not raise the score, but the team who was focused on improving their key drivers' performances.

"Fixing broken processes and fixing customer issues build the platform for winning customer advocacy."

Improving Advocacy Is Not a Spectator Sport
All parts of the organisation needed to act and move in the same direction to improve their Net Promoter performance. For example, their Managing Director asked 25 directors to name 12 issues raised by customers. The first time they were asked, it took them 13 tries. The second time they tried the exercise, they were able to correctly identify the issues the first time. Key success factors were:

• Keep it simple and easily understood by everyone.
• Constantly reinforce the importance of staying close to the customers.
• Create a cross-divisional group empowered to make the big decisions.
• Let customers drive the focus of improvement efforts.
• Embed into the organisation - successful customer experience management programs aim to embed skills and knowledge in their operations and not the centre.

When they started the program, they did not have a central division empowered to drive the vision. At the start, there were a lot of conflicts in how they measured customer loyalty. They were measuring it from their business process view but not the customer view. Now in Virgin, customer perception is all that matters and customer perception has become the driving force behind improvements to their operational processes.

Key Learnings

• Develop early proof points. Their focus on first contact resolution resulted in less cancellations.
• Create an early snapshot of the cost to the business and value to their customers by touch points.
• Stop spending money on the things that customers do not value.
• Market level scores are more interesting than they are actionable.
• Connecting dots between operations, financial and loyalty data takes time.

No Excuses, the Secret of Success Is Not That Secret
So far, the Virgin Net Promoter program has been successful in being a catalyst for cultural change. It was a simple concept to understand and rally around, a continuous feedback mechanism where everyone from the front line to senior management could clearly see the impact of their interactions.

"We did this to benchmark ourselves against other organizations. We wanted to execute the program better than anyone else. This was our operational model:

1. Collect and distribute customer feedback.
2. Interpret the data.
3. Mobilize the organisation around what the customers told us in their own words.
4. Operational delivery: it was about consistently being the best at each touch-point that mattered.

Right data, right hands, right way and right time"

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