Virgin Money makes customer service faster and easier with Power Virtual Agents

A matter of routine

No company can thrive without strong customer service. Virgin Money, a bank operating in the United Kingdom, understands this well. To help them deliver outstanding customer experience and stand out in the banking industry, Virgin Money takes a digital-first approach.

Knowing that delivering excellent service is more than just responding to calls—it’s about managing and understanding the need for calls in the first place—Virgin Money wanted to create an additional experience to help customers solve less-complex queries without needing to speak with someone. “Prior to the launch of Power Virtual Agent, customers would use live chat and be directed to an agent immediately, increasing demand and wait times in our contact centers.” explains Claire Mackinnon, the Channel Development Programme Manager at Virgin Money. 

Mackinnon says Virgin Money knew that if customers had answers and service at their fingertips and could get answers to their questions through another channel, it would create a better customer experience overall. It could also free up customer service agents to tend more effectively to more complex questions. Creating customer support chatbots was a natural solution.

Answering straightforward questions

Virgin Money had looked at implementing a chatbot more than a decade ago, but the technology and the human support required at the time was just too limited to be useful. The introduction of Microsoft Power Virtual Agents however, provided exactly the right tools the company needed to better serve customers.

Virgin Money started by building a chatbot into its mobile banking app in January of 2022, followed by subsequent chatbots in the pages for online banking and credit card customers. Virgin Money designed the chatbots to answer common questions on topics like local branch hours and provide direct links to necessary services, such as cancelling automatic payments or explaining overdraft fees. “We wanted to provide less-complex information up-front, and with the help of Power Virtual Agents on top of our existing live chat experience, we could make it much easier for customers to self-serve. If a customer needed to speak to an agent, it was for something more complex than a basic question.,” says Mackinnon. “It was all about managing contacts, providing different support options, and ensuring customer queries could be handled through the most appropriate channels. We wanted the Power Virtual Agent chatbot to be the go-to online communication and servicing tool within the banking app.” 

Almost immediately, Virgin Money noticed an improvement in customer support. The in-app chatbot alone handles over 195,000 requests from customers every single month with a significant portion resolved without escalation to a live agent. 

When the chatbot can’t resolve a customer query, it still provides resources for a live agent. “The chatbot will pass the transcript of its conversation with the customer on to the agent,” Mackinnon explains. “Looking at the transcript, there’s less need to ask the customer to repeat information, which can be a cause of frustration, because it’s all there. Agents can pick up where the chatbot left off. People understand and appreciate it more when they really need to speak with an agent.”

In addition, the low-code benefit of Power Virtual Agents means that updating and refining the chatbots minimizes time-consuming and often costly requests to IT. Employees regularly update the chatbot with information to respond to the most pressing current questions for customers, like ‘how do I deal with rising cost-of-living expenses?’ “With the control offered to Virgin Money by the low-code and flexible environment for topic management, you can explore what’s there and then just play with it, it’s a great way to better understand its capabilities. That’s where you find little gems that you might not have been aware of. You can explore and find additional opportunities,” Mackinnon says.

“Redi” for the next steps

While Mackinnon’s team has been hard at work on their chatbots, the next evolution from Virgin Money is already on the way. Seeing the success of the chatbots and the power of Power Virtual Agents inspired Adam Gwatkin, Head of Unsecured Digital Banking Experiences at Virgin Money to explore how to best use Power Virtual Agents in the credit card side of the business. His team’s efforts have produced an even more sophisticated and responsive virtual assistant for customers in Virgin Money’s credit card division.

Named ‘Redi’, they have introduced a digital host which not only uses natural language AI to understand what customers are looking for without relying on specific keywords but can also walk customers through an entire customer service journey.  Instead of merely asking for help in changing their addresses, understanding why their card was declined, or requesting a replacement card, Redi acts as an extension of the live agent team, going through all the necessary steps to ask appropriate questions and even make changes to bank account information during the interaction.  Redi has also been trained to smoothly transition complex conversations just as one agent might hand off a call to a more specialized agent, and customer satisfaction over how those transitions are happening has remained high.

Gwatkin says Redi has been designed to feel "more human.” “Customers using Redi for the first time will often say, for example, ‘Tell me a joke.’ as a test.  But Redi has been designed to be conversational in nature, so when you ask that for the first time, it’ll give you a randomly generated joke. It’ll even tell you a second one before saying, ‘All right, I want to get some work done now,’” Gwatkin explains. “The Virgin brand gives us license to have these fun interactions that other banks don’t, and we’ve played into that with Redi.”

Redi is currently limited to the company’s credit card division, but Gwatkin is already looking to the future and making it available across the company. “It’s more powerful than the other Q&A chatbots we have. An AI-powered full virtual assistant that can save the time of human agents for dealing with the more complex questions. We’re already seeing about 50 percent of interactions being fully contained by Redi,” Gwatkin says, “which, for something that is less than two months old, is quite an achievement.”

The foundation of strong digital service

One of the main goals for Virgin Money moving forward is to improve the functionality of the chatbots with AI technology like natural speech recognition. Gwatkin’s team is also looking at the possibility of deploying a chatbot for internal use so that Virgin Money staff members can have simple questions answered automatically, potentially bolstering productivity by cutting down on inquiries.

MacKinnon also sees how working on chatbots together can benefit employees. “Last year, the chatbot we delivered got so much credit for improving employee experiences,” MacKinnon says. “It really got the hearts and minds going. It’s nice to bring people together to work on something brand-new.” 

Gwatkin and his team are also now poised for expansion of Redi capabilities. Redi has already been trained to understand things like regional slang and, after its full rollout to credit cards, the hope is to expand it across all Virgin Money, replacing existing chatbots. By providing customers with answers to routine questions faster and giving employees more information going into service calls, these chatbot help Virgin Money deliver outstanding customer experiences in a digital-first environment. With the Redi rollout on the way, the company's support operations will be even faster, more effective, and more immersive.

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