Virgin Media

Single Customer View Provides In-Depth Customer Insight

Following a series of mergers, Virgin Media inherited numerous disparate customer databases. To harvest in-depth customer insights, the company needed to establish a single view of the customer across all business areas. Now, thanks to a centralised customer recognition platform provided by Acxiom, the telecoms and media provider can connect with its customers with precision-targeted communications and relevant offers.

The Company

Formed when NTL, Telewest and Virgin Mobile joined forces, Virgin Media is one of the UK’s leading telecommunications companies. Headquartered in Hook, Hampshire, it has around 12,000 employees and was the first UK company to provide a combined telecoms and media package of four services: broadband, TV, mobile phone and home phone.

Making Sense of the Data

With customer records from dozens of ex-NTL and Telewest franchises, as well as Virgin Mobile legacy systems, conducting data analysis to support marketing strategy proved a challenge. To gain insight and ensure effective marketing operations, the company needed to establish a consolidated view of customers across all business areas. By achieving a 360-degree view of customers, Virgin Media would be able to make informed decisions about the business potential of different market sectors. The company would also be able to communicate with customers in a targeted way with relevant offers, enhancing customer satisfaction and building brand loyalty.

Centralised Customer Recognition Platform

The telecommunications provider looked for a specialist data management partner that could help it to create a centralised customer-recognition solution. This would bring legacy systems from all business units together in a single, unified data platform.

Virgin Media was impressed by Acxiom’s proven track record in delivering customer data management projects and was also eager to leverage Acxiom’s linking matching technology, which would increase the efficiency of the consolidation process. In addition, the data management company’s pragmatic approach, structuring projects to realise operational efficiencies as quickly as possible so that a financial return is seen early on, made Acxiom the obvious choice.

Phased Implementation

Acxiom’s team of highly experienced consultants and project managers worked to define Virgin Media’s business needs before recommending a solution and roadmap. A phased implementation allowed Virgin Media to benefit from an early release of the solution so that the company could begin to understand its market positioning at the earliest possible opportunity. The bespoke solution combined complex business rules with linking technology which delivered a 15% improvement in data matching compared to a competitor product previously used by Virgin Media. This was a key factor in the early completion of the project within just three months.

Cross-Sell Opportunities

Ready availability of accurate data is now supporting a wide range of marketing and customer care initiatives at Virgin Media. These range from customer service personnel seeing accurate customer history information when answering an inbound call, to issuing relevant offers to existing customers to encourage them to upgrade and extend their service package. The customer recognition platform has transformed Virgin Media’s understanding of customers across different business groups with the resulting ability to communicate carefully targeted up-sell and cross-sell offers to customers. This improved customer insight and enhanced product holding recognition has enabled Virgin Media to achieve a 5 year (contribution margin) uplift of over £120m.

Lasting Impact

Virgin Media believes that the customer recognition implemented by Acxiom will have a lasting impact on the company’s ability to formulate and deliver winning marketing and customer retention strategies. And members of the company’s marketing team know that they can call on the data management specialist for advice and support, as and when required.