The customer In France, Virgin Mobile is commercialized by Omer Telecom, a joint venture between Virgin and Carphone Wharehouse groups. Virgin Mobile operates as a new French Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) by using the Orange network. Since the 3rd of April 2006, it offers an easy, innovative, clear and competitive offer to French consumers. Virgin Mobile, founded in 1999 in UK by Richard Branson, has offices in Australia (2000), United States (2002), and Canada (2005). With more than 10 million of customers worldwide, Virgin Mobile’s arrival in France is based on a real expertise in mobile telephony.

The issues / the stakes

The new MVNO has determined three (3) priorities to succeed in an already very competitive market: simplicity, transparency, and quality.

Of course quality is noticeable in the virtual operator offers but also in its customer’s relationship management. However, the targeted market – the 12 to 25 years consumers range – are internet proficient and easily use email as a means of communication. Therefore management of incoming emails is a major stake. The goal for Virgin Mobile is to provide the best quality responses while maintaining a fast turnaround response time.

The management of those emails was outsourced to the The Phone House’s services department; a Quality charter was defined imposing a 48 hour maximum response time to internet users’ queries.

Akio Mail Center deployement

Forecasting a fast growth of incoming emails, the option of a professional solution is quickly preferred compared to a specific development or to a traditional metools adaptation.

“Akio being already deployed by Breizh Mobile and The Phone House, the choice of Akio Mail Center appeared quite natural to us”, explained Vincent Bernard, Customer Service Manager. A team of agents, based in Laval, were trained to operate the software.

Deployment was realized in two steps. A first step enabled the implementation of Akio Mail Center with a simple customization: the aim was to quickly reach the required quality of service. Subsequently, after a few weeks in production, a more precise analysis of the emails management organization and types of emails allowed a deeper customization: routing rules, merge fields settings, alert and escalation systems...

With a successful deployment, Virgin Mobile now wants to go further: several projects are being studied, among them the integration of Akio Mail Center with a knowledge database and with the MVNO’s CRM application. The main benefits of integrating Akio with the CRM are the ability to obtain a global view through the CRM of customers contacts, independent of the media used, and the ability to open a customer’s profile from Akio Mail Center’s application, just as a CTI does for a Call Center.

The benefits

As underlined by Virgin Mobile, the first benefit of the chosen solution is its similarity with the telephony management solutions.

“Our incoming emails are managed by our Call Center; it was therefore necessary for us to choose a solution that was similar to an ACD”, Vincent Bernad explains,  “Akio Mail Center offers numerous similar functionalities: supervision capacity, time and quality of response follow-up and management, flow and quality of service statistics”.

Like many companies, the MVNO receives many of « recurrent » emails that can be responded with templates. Once more, Akio Mail Center provides functionalities that Virgin really appreciates.

“An artificial intelligence engine analyses the email content, and automatically proposes to the agent the most relevant template issued from the database. In most cases, the agent only checks the relevance of the template before sending it. This system enables a very quick response to this kind of email, and consequently allows more time for dealing with more complex or more specific emails”, explains Vincent Bernard.

Agents can also propose new templates, to feed the database. Performance and quality of service are there: more than 95% of the incoming emails are responded in less than 48 hours...

At last, the solution’s ergonomics and user friendliness have been emphasized by the virtual operator. “It only took a day and an half training to make our agents operational; Akio’s very intuitive interface enabled us to train the new agents ourself, without Akio’s help”, Vincent Bernard said.