Virgin Media is the United Kingdom’s leading entertainment and communications company—the first to offer consumers broadband, digital TV, phone and mobile from one company.  Today Virgin Media is the largest Virgin branded company in the world, with almost 13,000 employees and ten million customers across the UK.

The Challenge

In 2009 Virgin Media embarked on a web optimisation programme to enhance the user experience on all their customer websites:  Virgin Media, Virgin Media Shop and Virgin Mobile.  Their main aim was to improve the current support areas on all three websites, whilst at the same time gain valuable insight into what their users actually wanted to know.

The Solution

After an extensive selection process, Virgin Media selected a virtual assistant from Creative Virtual as they felt this was the best option to meet their needs.  They identified that, among other pieces of functionality, Creative Virtual’s solutions are able to:

• Understand questions asked in natural language
• Provide decision trees to enable the user to ask further questions to help drill down to the correct answer
• Be highly scalable
• Identify from which website generic questions were asked and provide the relevant answer
• Provide a full reporting suite that will identify trends, requirements, etc.
• Have the ability to handover to live chat and web forms if required
• Be integrated with other systems

The Creative Virtual team attacked the challenge by creating Ask Jenny with two separate knowledgebases:  one for the Virgin Media and Virgin Media Shop websites and one for the Virgin Mobile site.  The Virgin Media knowledgebase was created first. 

Ask Jenny employs an animated avatar created to be a likeness of an actual call centre agent.  The real “Jenny” even contributed to the virtual assistant’s smalltalk with answers to questions such as her favourite food and drink.  Jenny responds to the user inputs with a range of seven different “emotions”.

In order to launch Jenny from the Virgin Media Help page, users must choose if they are an existing customer or a potential new customer.  However, Jenny is also able to determine from the user’s input if she is being asked an existing service or a sales inquiry and switches context as needed.

The virtual assistant for the Virgin Media website has been created with Site Context in order to provide reliable information for both Virgin Media’s National and Cable Broadband customers.  Through the use of cookies, Jenny “remembers” this information about a user between sessions and automatically provides details for the correct type of service each time the V-Person™ is opened.

A dropdown menu of FAQ categories makes it even easier for users to find the answers they need while an optional feedback form helps Virgin Media and the Creative Virtual team identify any information that may be incorrect or missing from Jenny’s knowledgebase.

The Result

Jenny was launched on the Virgin Media website on 3rd September 2009 and soon after appeared on the Virgin Media Shop website.  The Virgin Mobile version of Ask Jenny is currently in development.
The Virgin Media knowledgebase has nearly tripled in size in the first six months providing valuable insight into the users’ requirements whilst at the same time providing customers with an interactive and easy to use help tool.

Ask Jenny can be found through http://www.chatbots.org/virtual_assistant/jenny/