Content Management: Virgin Mobile Transforms Web Presence With Interwoven To Deliver Award-Winning, Premium Online Customer Experience

Worldwide, the Virgin brand is associated with fun, quality, value, and a sense of competitive challenge across a range of travel, media, and lifestyle products and services. It seems as if there is no industry Virgin cannot enter and win. Case in point, Virgin Mobile, the UK's leading mobile virtual network operator, has been consistently recognized for its high customer satisfaction. But its Web strategy lacked the cutting-edge capabilities needed to better serve its four million customers and take its business to even greater heights.

The structure of Virgin Mobile's six-year-old Website made it difficult and time consuming to roll out Web content on new products, services, and promotions. And while Virgin Mobile collected rich Web analytics, it lacked the ability to effectively act on the results. "At Virgin, our customer is the focus of everything we do, and we wanted the Virgin Mobile Web experience to reflect that," said Phil Gates, head of online marketing and development at Virgin Mobile and Virgin Media. "We needed to have a stronger two-way conversation with our customers, and a way to respond faster to new service offerings and real-time customer feedback."

Virgin Mobile called upon Interwoven to deliver the best-in-class user experience that customers expect from the Virgin brand and to expand online sales. Virgin Mobile deployed Interwoven TeamSite as its standard platform for Web content creation, management, and publishing for virginmobile.co.uk. With TeamSite, Virgin Mobile's new Website featured upgraded e-commerce capabilities, improved self-service, and more efficient provisioning of products and services – all made possible through integration of the Interwoven-powered Web front-end with 15 back-end applications.

In addition, TeamSite helped Virgin Mobile act on customer behavior data – delivered by Web analytics from Coremetrics – to optimize content for specific customer segments to create engaging, relevant interactions designed to attract viewers and convert customers. Virgin Mobile is now able to introduce a new offer one day, see how its market responds, and then easily make adjustments the next day if needed.

In return, Virgin Mobile has seen a dramatic improvement in the contribution of its Website to its business, from less than six percent of all sales volume in 2004 to now over 30 percent. With the launch of the new site in 2006, self-service interactions via the Website increased by more than 80% and now equal the number of call center service inquiries. So it was no surprise when virginmobile.co.uk was recently voted telecom Website of the Year 2006 by UK internet users.

"As one of world's most innovative brands, Virgin is always re-writing the rules on how best to create exceptional customer experiences," said Ben Kiker, chief marketing officer at Interwoven. "In wireless, Virgin Mobile has set the pace in delivering award-winning customer service, and Interwoven has helped extend that experience to the Web. The company understands that the ability to deliver targeted and engaging content to the right customer at the right time plays a strategic role in helping them increase online revenue."

Constantly Measuring and Enhancing
Virgin Mobile is continually improving its customers' experiences by closely monitoring customer usage and feedback. Interwoven helps Virgin Mobile make this data actionable through its Open Analytics Framework, which provides pre-built connectivity with Web analytics technology. "We saw a significant opportunity to continually enhance the way we interacted with our online customers. We were collecting lots of great data about visitor traffic and we wanted to tailor that content to online customer behavior," said Gates.

Now when Virgin Mobile considers a site change, the Online Development group assesses the details of how customers have been arriving at the page in question: What do they do there? How long do they spend? What are the page hotspots? How do they exit?

"After we make a change, we can immediately evaluate the impact of our changes. More importantly, the content owners can easily make any needed adjustments to make sure we're reaching the right customers with the right message in the right way to boost conversions and maximize their value to our business," added Gates.

Accelerating Time-to-Web
Critical to the success of this "actionable insight," Virgin Mobile has been able to dramatically accelerate its time-to-impact for new content on the Web. "Previously when we had changes to the Web – even minor copy changes – they had sometimes required four to six weeks to execute. With Interwoven, we've brought that cycle down to as little as 15 minutes. We're now able to implement customer-oriented initiatives far more quickly and responsively," said Gates.

Interwoven TeamSite has made it possible for Virgin Mobile to execute more frequent Web changes and put most of the power in the hands of business users, rather than burdening IT with marketing projects. "We're enabling the business units to generate more value from every customer interaction. We can deliver products, services, and campaigns with the speed and flexibility required to capture fast-moving opportunities with just the right message," said Gates.

About Virgin Mobile
Virgin Mobile is the UK's largest mobile virtual network operator and uses T-Mobile's network. Since its launch in November 1999, Virgin Mobile has attracted more than 4 million customers. Virgin Mobile is part of Virgin Media. The group is the first to be able to offer 'quadruple play' to customers: mobile and fixed line telephony, broadband internet and television.

In the UK, Virgin Mobile phones are available direct on 0845 6000 600; on the web at www.virginmobile.co.uk or on the high street at approximately 5,000 outlets including Virgin Mobile Stores and those within Virgin Megastores, The Carphone Warehouse, Phones 4 U, Currys, Currys.digital, Comet, Tesco, Asda, John Lewis, Argos and Woolworths plus hundreds of independent mobile phone dealers and available via Littlewoods Shop Direct Home Shopping Grattan and Empire home shopping channels.

Virgin Mobile employs approximately 1,700 staff at three sites, Trowbridge, London and Daventry, and has an outsourced customer service centre operated by approximately 200 staff in Middlesbrough.

Virgin Mobile was voted 22nd in the Best Workplaces in the UK Financial Times survey for 2006 and is once again in the top 50 in 2007. Virgin Mobile was honoured at Management Today's Most Admired Companies Awards 2006, being voted the best company for the Ability to Attract, Develop and Retain Top Talent.

SOURCE: Virgin Mobile