Virgin Media enhances cost control and customer service levels with standardised thin client environment

Customer challenge

Virgin Media was created following the merger of ntl, Telewest and Virgin Mobile. Maintaining customer satisfaction during and after the merger was vital for Virgin Media. The company's contact centres are at the heart of Virgin Media's customer service operation. The company needed to find an efficient and cost-effective way to provide staff at these centres and other Virgin Media sites with reliable access to core business applications.

Computacenter solution

Virgin Media decided to take advantage of ntl and Telewest's previous investment in thin client technology and deploy a standardised Citrix environment with Microsoft SoftGrid application virtualisation to its contact centres. With Computacenter assisting with design, testing, application packaging and implementation, Virgin Media had developed a 100-strong Citrix Presentation Server farm. The new environment has helped to speed up application and server provisioning, as well as reduce the pressure on the company's bandwidth and the risk of unauthorised software.

Results

The thin client environment will help Virgin Media achieve significant savings both from reduced energy bills and IT support costs. At the same time, staff are able to work smarter and faster, which means a better level of service for Virgin Media's customers. This in turn will help the company retain its competitive advantage and continue to grow its subscriber base.

Download case study

Customer profile

A communications and entertainment powerhouse
A large number of consumers rely on Virgin Media for a combination of phone, mobile, television and broadband services. The company is the UK's most popular broadband provider and the largest virtual mobile network operator.

Virgin Media's consumer television offerings include an advanced on-demand service and high-specification personal video recorder. The company also owns two content businesses, which encompass 17 entertainment and retail television channels such as LIVINGtv, Bravo and bid tv.

Virgin Media was created in 2006 following the merger of NTL and Telewest with Virgin Mobile, and is now the largest Virgin company in the Virgin Group.

Business challenge

Maintaining quality of service for customers
Maintaining customer satisfaction during and after the merger was vital for Virgin Media. The company's contact centres are at the heart of Virgin Media's customer service operation, and respond to thousands of queries every day.

As well as ensuring customer service levels, Virgin Media wanted to take advantage of the merger both in terms of past investments and future synergies.

Core to achieving this goal was the creation of a centralised and standardised IT environment – both for the company's contact centres and other offices.

With Virgin Mobile, Telewest and ntl all using different processes and platforms in their contact centres, unifying this environment was a priority following the merger. As Nick Carter, Senior Technical Specialist, for Virgin Media, explains: "Our contact centre agents were using different systems, when we needed to be working as one company. This lack of standardisation had the potential to impact both productivity and service levels."

Providing standard and fast access to corporate applications, such as email and customer management solutions, is important not only for internal and outsourced contact centre agents but also other Virgin Media staff – especially those that work remotely.

"We wanted to provide staff with a standard and consistent experience while also reduce the total cost of ownership of our IT environment," comments Nick.

Computacenter solution

Providing efficient and cost-effective access to corporate applications
As part of the merger, the company inherited ntl's and Telewest's existing Citrix thin client environments. As Nick explains: "We wanted to leverage the investment that had already been made in thin client technology. We also recognised this approach would enable us to meet our goals for simplifying the operation of our contact centres and provisioning outsourced users with corporate applications."

Based on Computacenter's involvement in the ntl project and its thin client expertise, Virgin Media continued this partnership, with Computacenter assisting with the design, testing, application packaging and implementation of the Citrix environment.

The environment is based on a 100-strong Citrix Presentation Server farm, which will be capable of supporting up to 6,000 concurrent users. To help deliver applications to these users – and the Neoware thin client devices that have been deployed – Virgin Media has also implemented SoftGrid and AppSense Management software.

This has helped to simplify not only the provisioning of applications but also ongoing performance. For example, AppSense enables Virgin Media to identify if a specific application or thin client device is impacting the quality of service for other users by consuming excessive bandwidth. This solution will also help Virgin Media prevent any unauthorised software running on its Citrix server farm.

During the planning stage, it became evident that Virgin Media had a large application set of up to 750 applications for deployment onto the Citrix Farm. Microsoft SoftGrid application virtualisation was introduced to dramatically reduce application regression testing time and to avoid application conflicts that would have required additional hardware in server silos. Application virtualisation allowed for all applications to co-exist and reduce the risk of adding applications to the server builds.

As well as helping to optimise the performance and availability of core applications, the project has also enhanced sever provisioning and printing. "With Computacenter's help, we were able to develop an automated script for deploying new servers. We can now build servers in under two hours – and carry out multiple builds concurrently. The script can be modified quickly to accommodate changes in server hardware," comments Nick.

Using ThinPrint software, Virgin Media is able to minimise the network traffic from printing and the need to deploy multiple drivers on the server farm.

Results

Staff can work faster and smarter
Once fully deployed, the Citrix environment will eventually be used by around half
of Virgin Media's workforce. So far, first line agents at six of the company's contact centres have already been migrated to the new Citrix environment.

Although only halfway through the deployment, Virgin Media is already reaping the rewards of the thin client environment. These include:

Increased business agility: The ability to quickly provision new applications and servers means that Virgin Media can respond more effectively to customer and business demands, for example bringing a new outsourced contact centre on line. Staff can also work more flexibly between different Virgin Media offices and their own homes.

Improved cost control: The standardised thin client environment is easier – and therefore – cheaper to support. Virgin Media also expects to cut costs through the deployment of the energy-efficiency Neoware thin client devices. This will also help the company reduce its carbon footprint.

Enhanced customer service levels: By ensuring contact centre agents have reliable access to customer management solutions, Virgin Media can provide a better level of service to its millions of customers.

In the crowded UK communications market, customer service is vital to
maintaining competitive advantage. As Nick confirms, "By providing staff with
better access to corporate applications, we are able to improve their productivity,
which has a direct impact on customer service levels. And better service means
higher levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty, which is key to growing our
subscriber base."