2016 Bronze Best data strategy

Agency itg Creator

Client Virgin Trains

Campaign summary

Big (customer feedback) data on a real-time awesometer

Campaign overview

To deliver live ‘Voice of the Customer’ to the fingertips of the organisation.

Through the collection and collation of customer sentiment, the challenge was to provide an analytical portal of realtime passenger feedback, and improve customer experience and increase customer satisfaction.

Strategy

The campaign created a first in UK travel: the ability to survey public transport customers through multi-channel marketing automation.

The result was the creation of vast sums of ‘Big’ data visualisation, giving control to Virgin Trains staff and management, and overcoming technical challenges from collation of sentiment via two entry routes: push (contacting known bookers), and pull (‘walk-on’ passengers).

Sentiment data was mapped back to the originating journey across 330+ daily Virgin Trains departures. The voice of the customer sentiment question paths were tailored to each individual, providing real time survey responses.

The public service business presents so many dimensions of data where customer opinion matters, categorised and filtered by train, route, times, stations, class, customer profile, demographics, value as well as unstructured sentiment - all delivered in real time to all Virgin Trains’ staff.

Creativity

The ‘Awesometer’ brings data to life, with the voice of the customer at the heart of the business, creating a clean, UX-friendly, intuitive minimal-click experience.

Data collection is tactile, responsive, easy to use and encourages completion. It was presented in an interactive, train of thought analysis, embedded into the fabric of Virgin’s customer service.

Responses appeared in real time across millions of rows of customer and train data. Users slice and dice responses, plot satisfaction trends, compare KPIs across service areas or group feedback by consistent themes.

Staff benchmark their improvement by route, train, station and view their position in league tables.

Virgin Trains draws value from customer sentiment data, understanding customers better and enabling them to make changes quickly and effectively.

Results

The Awesometer provides Virgin Trains with the information to work towards their Net Advocacy Score (NAS) goal.

NAS has become part of staff performance, so teams take ownership of improving customer experience. More than 700 Virgin Trains staff now access the portal.

For customers, it means the improvements they want to see are happening.

The Awesometer helps the Fleet Team dictate the design of the next fleet of trains. Feedback on the quality of Wi-Fi has led to BEAM - the new train entertainment system.

Mentions of stress caused by running for the platforms at Euston incited the new boarding SMS, telling customers their platform. Concerns raised by group travellers have been tackled, with trials of increased staff on platforms to assist boarding and the Awesometer captures the results.

Team

Chris McDermott (Customer Advocacy Manager) • Sheryl Gannaway (Account Director) • Mark Brennan (CEO) • Kinnari Ladha (Marketing Insight Director) • Piers Batchelor (Insight Application Design Developer) • Tom Sheahan (Senior Digital Designer) • Joseph Waghorn (Frontend Developer) • Steve Killelay (Solutions Architect) • Lisa Kohl (Project Manager) • Imtiaz Ullah (Head of Application Support) • Dale Peacock (Development Manager)