Virgin Media beats churn with data management

Europe's largest cable TV operator, Virgin Media has reduced customer churn to an all-time low, thanks in part to its investment in data management.

The company, which covers 12.5 million UK homes with its fibre-optical network, was formed by the merger of operators NTL and Telewest. In turn, those companies had grown out of the consolidation of regional UK cable operators.

This, according to Stephen Tidswell, head of IT applications support, had affected the company's ability to form a single view of its customers. "We had 24 separate databases, which which could cause problems for customer-facing agents. Navigating through those would be a nightmare," he said.

The company uses ICOMS software from Convergys for all its customer service and billing systems. Rather than run a customer relationship management system, Virgin Media uses ICOMS in conjunction with a number of additional applications for specific functions. Several, such as the complaints handling system, were developed in house.

This, according to Tidswell, is one reason that Virgin Media has not moved to a centralised customer relationship management system. "That is on the to-do list; ICOMS is a green-screen application but the simple answer is that it works, it does what it is supposed to do, and doesn't fall over," Tidswell told IT PRO. "It was quite an easy choice to consolidate on ICOMS, as although other platforms may be sexier, they don't have the stability we need."

Instead, the company created a customer data hub using data management tools fromInformatica. The hub takes data from the various systems and ICOMS databases and presents them to customer services staff on a single screen.

This relatively technical innovation has already had an impact on customer service levels and even customer retention, Tidswell claims. One reason is that information is now available to agents in real time. Previously, systems relied on batch updates that took place overnight.

"More often than you might expect, customers contact us on multiple occasions during a single day," Tidswell explained. "Not having those details available would cause problems. If a change in service was made or a payment received or a fault fixed, we can now see that and that is incredibly important."

Consolidating the customer service agents' various applications into one single screen has had another, softer benefit too. "At Virgin Media we are currently fixing the fundamentals. A key component of that was customer retention and reducing churn," Tidswell said. "If, as an agent, what you have to think about is running 24 different systems, that is what you will be doing rather than focusing your energy on the customer."