Transforming our service: How we’re investing to better support every customer

Lutz Schüler, Chief Executive, Virgin Media O2

Virgin Media O2 has a reputation for providing customers with excellent products. Whether it’s offering ultrafast gigabit broadband right across our national network, rewarding our customers with exclusive access and perks through Priority, or delivering innovative mobile offers like inclusive EU roaming, our customers rightly have high expectations of us.

We invest more than £5 million every day to improve, maintain and expand our services and ensure we give customers what they expect. Most customers benefit from this, receive excellent value and are satisfied with their services.

But we also know that when it comes to how we serve our customers and how we support them when they need help, we have more work to do in some areas.

Complaints data published by the regulator Ofcom over recent months and years, and indeed our own data, has shown that some customers don’t always get the fast and efficient support they expect. We know that needs to change and we are on the path to doing that.

While I’m pleased that the vast majority of our customers are satisfied with the service they receive, we are committed to doing better. Our goal, which we’re already backing with increased investment, is to provide consistently exceptional service and give all our customers greater confidence that if an issue does arise, they will be able to contact us easily and we’ll be able to provide a speedy resolution. Basically, if there’s a problem we’ll fix it quickly, simply and with no hassle.

That is why, last year, we drew a line in the sand and implemented a comprehensive strategy to transform customer service. It’s focused on four main areas:

1) Targeted investment: We are nearly doubling investment in customer service and targeting it to the areas that will make the biggest difference. We’ve boosted the number of care agents to over 9,000 today, including recruiting into specialist teams that handle the most complex queries, and we’re investing in new IT tools so that agents can more easily access the information they need to help resolve issues first time.

2) Simplifying systems and processes: We’re creating a single customer services function that will see agents able to support all Virgin Media and O2 customers. Today, too often customers are passed between teams so we’re going to simplify so that our agents can better support customers with whatever they need help with. This will take some time, but in future, customers will dial a single number and wait in one queue to get help with their broadband, TV, landline or mobile.

3) Upskilling customer agents: We’re providing additional training to our 9,000 agents, meaning the vast majority of customer queries – from service issues to billing enquiries, broadband sales to mobile upgrades – can be resolved first-time by our multi-skilled agents. In-store teams will also receive additional training so they can take greater ownership of customer issues and resolve things there and then. We’ll also roll out new AI tools – not to replace our human agents, but to help them be the best they can be – and allow them to spend more time helping customers.

4) Removing persistent pain points: We’ve carried out forensic analysis of thousands of historic complaints to identify the root cause of customer issues so we can tackle things that consistently frustrate our customers. These changes can be small things like changing how we handle fraud issues or ensuring that our field techs have boosters to hand when installing new customers so any blackspots can be resolved there and then. But they can be big things, too, like the investment we’ve made in Smart Support technology that will help identify, diagnose and resolve broadband issues before a customer even reports a fault to us.

There isn’t a simple overnight fix. It will take time to get to where we want to be, and there may be bumps on the road, but we’re already seeing some real tangible progress.

In the past three months, 92% of complaints raised were resolved within 24 hours, and by the end of last year we reduced the number of Ofcom complaints by 48% compared with the average monthly run rate in 2023, surpassing the ambitious 40% target we set ourselves. In December, complaints relating to Virgin Media were at the lowest levels since 2017, while complaints about O2 hadn’t been lower for two years. We expect these latest improvements to be reflected in future Ofcom statistical releases.

Away from complaints data, we’ve reduced call transfers for both Virgin Media and O2 customers by 18% and 12% respectively since the start of 2024, while average call waiting times reduced from two minutes in 2023 to 44 seconds in the past three months, and just 20 seconds in January alone.

These green shoots give me confidence that we have the right plan in place to transform customer service and will get to where we want to be.

For all the millions of pounds we invest in our networks, for the success of our fibre rollout, for the great value we offer through Priority and inclusive EU roaming, I know that ultimately what matters most to customers is the service they get from us. We remain laser-focused on living up to our customers’ expectations and we are on track to get this right for good.