The platform will serve the 2,500 field service staff nationwide, providing the company’s service technicians with the tools needed to perform all customer installations and on-premise maintenance automatically, achieving greater efficiency and increased customer satisfaction.
Virgin was formed by the merger of the UK’s two largest cable companies, NTL and Telewest, and the subsequent acquisition of Virgin Mobile, with Virgin Media rebranded and launched in February 2007. The merger resulted in a combined mobile workforce of technicians and engineers using different technologies and field processes and Virgin Media was faced with the challenge of standardising operations across its business.
With the company offering a host of service packages to its millions of customers, it is vital that engineers can install, configure and activate the correct equipment at each customer’s home, as well as identifying and rectifying any problems first time.
Paul Buttery, managing director of the access division at Virgin Media: “In such a competitive market, customer service, and satisfaction, is key. Standardising our field activities and arming our customer facing staff with better mobile tools is a critical component in this, particularly as more customers are taking more services from us. Using Dexterra’s platform, our technicians are equipped with the necessary applications to complete each job on the first visit, which not only greatly increases internal efficiency and cost savings, but also ensures ongoing customer satisfaction.”
Virgin Media undertook a review of its application and platform solutions and selected Dexterra’s Concert platform based on the security and flexibility it offered, as well as its ability to provide a platform on which Virgin Media can develop further customised applications going forward. Based on the Dexterra platform, Virgin Media has developed its own field service application that is deployed on the field service force’s semi-ruggedised Motorola Symbol MC70 handsets.
Virgin Media field staff are trained to provide telephone, broadband and digital television support, all from the single device, making real-time back-end integration a necessity in order to resolve customer problems on the spot. The field service application specifically enables employees to perform diagnostic tests and activate services. This information is fed into Virgin Media’s in-house diagnostics system, ICOMS, through the Dexterra platform, with the relevant data or diagnostics results then relayed back to the mobile devices.
From a management perspective, the new solution provides Virgin Media with far greater insight into the status of current and outstanding tasks, as well as enabling the company to send out scheduling updates and job notifications as and when they occur.
Rikke Helms, managing director of EMEA for Dexterra, commented: “The pure nature of service providers means that staff are constantly out in the field liaising with and servicing customers, and customer loyalty can be gained or lost based on this interaction. It is therefore important that companies like Virgin Media choose the right mobility solution. With so many customer interactions occurring at field level on a daily basis there can be no margin for error. By deploying Dexterra’s proven mobility platform, Virgin Media has equipped its field staff with the tools to deliver the best possible standard of customer service.”