Redi, set, go: Virgin Money delivers exceptional customer experiences with Microsoft Copilot Studio

The Virgin brand is known for its irreverent personality and excellent customer service. That’s why the starting point for any innovation at Virgin Money is to ask how it will enhance customer service. The desire to create top-class customer experiences guides everything the team does. It is this philosophy that has inspired the Virgin Money team to create an award-winning virtual assistant.

How to boost digital confidence

The Virgin Money brand enjoys a high degree of digital engagement. A whopping 90 percent of its customers download the Virgin Money credit card app within the first 90 days of joining. Despite this, many customers call the Virgin Money contact centre to complete an activity they could complete on the app.

It was clear to the Virgin Money team that digital adoption isn’t the same as digital confidence. Users need to have a good amount of digital confidence as well as experience with financial services to feel comfortable completing many digital banking actions using an app.

Adam Paice, Head of Digital Proposition at Virgin Money, explains, “A mobile app in which you can move money in a couple of taps can actually be quite daunting for some people. Customers need to receive the help and information at the exact point in time that they need it. The genesis for us to introduce a virtual assistant was knowing we wanted to help our customers to bridge that gap and feel confident using our digital products and services.”

Empowering the contact centre team to create digital experiences

In order to understand the questions customers ask, the help and advice they need and the point at which they need it, Virgin Money turned to the people who know its customers best: its contact centre staff.

Gabby Allison, Digital Customer Adoption and Engagement Manager at Virgin Money, explains, “Our contact centre staff are used to being hands-on with customers on the phones, so they are in a great position to design our digital experiences so that customers can interact with Redi, our virtual assistant, exactly as they would interact with a live agent on the phone.”

Bringing contact centre staff into the conversational analyst team creates an exciting new potential career path for those employees while leveraging their hands-on experience to perfect the digital customer experience.

Choosing Microsoft Copilot Studio

With an innovative approach to mapping customer digital engagements and customer journeys embedded, the team’s thoughts turned to how to realise their ambitions.

“All our existing FAQs are stored in our Microsoft Dynamics 365 Knowledge Base. It makes sense to use Microsoft Copilot Studio to surface that information to customers. This integration – having an end-to-end Microsoft solution – simplifies reporting through Power BI, skills, architecture and support as well as giving us new choices,” explains Adam Paice.

“Copilot Studio is an enabler for us to create great customer experiences,” agrees Laura McLeod, Senior Product Owner for Conversational Banking at Virgin Money. “Its intuitive operation means that our conversation analysts, who typically come to us from the contact centre and do not have a technical background, can own the process of introducing new functionality or customer journeys in Redi from end to end. They hold the card throughout the journey. In this way, using Copilot Studio helps us to reduce the number of handoffs through our development lifecycle.”

Redi answers: on brand and in your own words

One of the primary concerns for the Virgin Money team was to ensure that Redi’s communication remained on brand.

“Copilot Studio gives us the licence to build the journey perfectly from a customer experience perspective,” says Adam Paice. “We’re probably the only virtual assistant in UK financial services that has a reply to the question ‘tell me a joke’.”

“We’re passionate about tone of voice,” agrees Gabby Allison. “We’ve also trained Redi to understand colloquialisms. Customers want to ask questions in their own words. We’ve trained Copilot Studio to interpret that information and match it to a predefined journey.”

For example, if a customer says they have “moved gaff”, Redi knows to direct that customer to the “moving house” journey.

Responsible use of AI is key

“When we originally developed Redi, we spent a lot of time with our compliance colleagues in risk, legal and fraud to make sure our journeys safeguarded customers,” recalls Gabby Allison. “One of the things we’re very clear on is how Redi introduces itself every time to make it clear Redi is a digital host.”

Adam Paice agrees, “As a regulated financial services company, it’s really important that we are clear on the steps customers have to take to get an outcome. We spent a lot of time getting those dialogue flows right.”

Redi to help – not replace

“Another of the principles we’re really focused on is that a virtual assistant shouldn’t be a barrier to interacting with humans,” emphasises Adam Paice.

“We see Redi as a member of the live chat team, working in an omnichannel way, aided by our use of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service’s omnichannel capabilities, to support customers. Redi does a great job triaging enquiries, but the conversation should be handed over to the right real person when appropriate.”

Gabby Allison gives the example of a call about a bereavement which requires extra sensitivity. “Redi recognises the situation and explains ‘I’m not the best person to speak with you about this, I’m going to put you in touch with someone who is’ and then will hand over to a member of the team.”

Fantastic customer satisfaction score

This type of triaging means that contact centre colleagues are freed from mundane, repetitive tasks. Their time is focused on speaking with customers for whom they can really add value. For the agents, this results in much more satisfying and rewarding work.

If a call is handed from Redi to a live agent, the colleague can read the entire conversation. This reduces repetition of questions and, because it’s in the mobile app, the live agent doesn’t need to spend extra time re-authenticating the customer. This creates a better experience for the customer and for the colleague.

“There’s also a halo effect,” explains Adam Paice. “Redi has a really high customer satisfaction score. When the virtual assistant can’t help and hands over to live chat, customers know what is happening and our colleagues are better informed and on point, so we see the satisfaction scores go up all round.”

Prioritise customer satisfaction as a success metric

The Virgin Money team prioritises customer satisfaction scores over containment rates, a traditional metric for measuring virtual assistant effectiveness. Containment means that the enquiry has been contained within the virtual assistant experience and live agent involvement was not required.

“We hit very high containment scores from day one, which we weren’t expecting,” says Adam Paice. “But, for us, a much more important metric is our customer satisfaction score. We want to know that the customer feels that the query has been handled satisfactorily by Redi.”

If a query requires the involvement of a live agent, the customer is fully informed of the next steps. “We don’t just forward people to a contact us page,” states Adam Paice. “We very clearly say our live team needs to speak with you. If we can’t hand off to the right real person immediately, we let the customer know the exact number to call and the information they’ll need to share. The customer leaves the chat fully aware, informed and empowered. I think this level of transparency is another reason Redi scores so highly.”

Redi is loved as a member of the team

The Virgin Money team understands that creating amazing customer experiences is intrinsically and symbiotically linked to creating amazing employee experiences.

Adam Paice adds, “I think it is telling that when we celebrated Redi’s first birthday on Microsoft Teams earlier this year, a huge number of colleagues turned up to the virtual meeting with special birthday backgrounds they had created to celebrate Redi. There is huge enthusiasm for this technology among our contact centre colleagues. They love the Redi experience because it helps them add more value in their role, too.”

Customers and a great team help Redi be more human

“Everyone involved in this project is very passionate about Redi,” says Adam Paice. “It’s our bread and butter to work together to improve the experience.  Noone loses sight of the customer at the end of the conversation.”

“We review Redi’s conversations and we invite customers into stores to ask them their thoughts and feelings on their interactions with Redi. Over coffee, we’ll talk about what they want to see in the future,” explains Laura MacLeod. “We want our customers to be as passionate about Redi as we are.”

“We understand the way customers speak with us very well and the barriers they face, but we are always looking for Redi to feel more natural and more human,” agrees Gabby Allison. “We did some testing in one of our stores and some of the customers told us they felt like they were speaking with a real human agent which is a massive compliment.”

“The same people who are reviewing Redi’s conversations are designing the journeys, so we have a closed loop of continuous improvement,” emphasises Laura MacLeod. “Again, it’s reducing handoffs and building ‘test and iterate’ into the earliest part of our development lifecycle. Because Copilot Studio is such a hands-on, simple framework, our customer journey designers can own the process fully.”

A streamlined tech stack with Microsoft

“Having everything sitting on one tech stack with Microsoft makes that process even easier,” states Adam Paice.

To further streamline and optimise the integration, infrastructure, support and skills, the business is currently migrating its proprietary workloads onto Microsoft Azure. Gary McLellan, Head of Engineering Frameworks & Core Mobile Apps at Virgin Money, explains, “A lot of this stuff sits on the Microsoft Business Applications stack, but we’re also migrating a lot of our core banking tech capability onto Microsoft Azure IaaS and PaaS services as well. We’re building all of our new capabilities in Azure with Azure Java and Azure Microservices. We want all our microservices and functions in Microsoft Azure for consolidation and ease of management and support.”

Adam Paice adds, “And, of course, having everything in our Microsoft stack enables us to easily deploy Power BI to produce the analytics for our end-to-end journey.”

Into the future with Generative AI

The team’s innovation has been recognised by The Card and Payments Awards, winning “Best application of AI in financial services” in February 2024.

“It’s an absolutely fantastic achievement and recognition of the team’s hard work,” Adam Paice says, “Our high customer satisfaction scores are driven by the conversational experience and that’s why we won the award. Redi has now handled well over 1m interactions and performance has remained strong since launch.”

The next phase will be to integrate advanced Generative AI capabilities to improve Redi’s conversational abilities still further.

“I think we’re all excited about how Generative AI can help us further develop Redi’s conversational experience,” says Adam Paice. “We want to take advantage of Copilot’s Generative AI capabilities so that we can use context to make the conversational experience feel even more immersive. By introducing Generative AI, we can enable customers to ask additional questions, even midway through an action, to keep them more informed and help them further. We’re already working with Microsoft to introduce this as part of Redi’s next evolution.”

As well as enhancing Redi’s conversational skills, the Virgin Money team sees additional use cases for Copilot, Microsoft’s Generative AI capabilities and Azure OpenAI. Potential use cases include supporting colleagues and gathering information as part of a fraud case or a complex query or dispute.

“Using Microsoft’s Generative AI capabilities to automate these processes is a massive opportunity for us as an organisation,” says Adam Paice. “We will develop this further with the new Generative AI capabilities in the Microsoft suite of products and we’re excited to deploy Redi wider across the organisation.”

Redi for everything

Adam Paice concludes, “By designing customer journeys in Microsoft Copilot, over 90% of our customers get what they want from Redi. The roadmap for Copilot is so full of new innovations, we know that we can continue to improve on our award-winning experiences.”

Allegra Patrizi, Managing Director at Virgin Money, agrees, “Microsoft Copilot Studio is the technology that enables Virgin Money to deliver great customer experiences through our Redi virtual assistant, helping us to set a new standard for digital customer engagement. This is evidenced by the high customer satisfaction scores, high levels of containment and great feedback from our colleagues. We are very excited to continue to develop Redi in Copilot Studio, placing these industry-leading tools directly in the hands of our customer experts in support of our mission to be the most loved bank.”