Virgin Media Ireland: Prioritising Telco Customer Experience

In recent years, the Republic of Ireland has become a technology-leading hub for digital transformation. Its overwhelming progress is only continuing, with the country’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) market having been valued at US$20.3bn in 2023.

One of the companies at the forefront of these changes is Virgin Media Ireland, Liberty Global’s telecommunications operation in Ireland. As at August 2024, the company offers broadband internet, digital television and mobile phone services to one million customers.

As a key player within the telecommunications and media industry, its key priorities are to deliver the best-in-class products and connectivity services. Likewise, customer experience is king and, with a methodical approach to digital transformation, Virgin Media Ireland is continuing to build up its partnerships and services to remain a leading figure in the telecoms sector.

‘Digital-first’ telco transformation in Ireland

John Walsh, Director of Technology Transformation for Virgin Media Ireland, is working to spearhead a comprehensive digital revolution within the company. He explains how the company is helping Ireland capitalise on its recent technology boom, leveraging its partnerships to position itself at the forefront of technological advancements in a competitive telecommunications landscape. 

“We have a responsibility in Virgin Media as a long-standing telco in Ireland to modernise and ensure that we're delivering services, particularly digital services, for our customers that use the services that have come in the tech boom,” he says. “That also requires a massive responsibility to ensure our telecommunications company is up to the highest standards.”

The organisation is embarking on a three-phase digital transformation journey. With a keen focus on customer-centric solutions, John continues to orchestrate this strategy to encompass digital enablement, operational modernisation and systems simplification. 

“We realised a long time ago that Virgin Media Ireland needed to modernise and offer the services to its customers on their terms,” he explains. “That drove a strategy of modernisation of our IT and technology infrastructure to ensure that we achieve that goal.”

With this in mind, Virgin Media Ireland has developed a large, multi-year strategy that aims to provide digital services to customers in a range of ways. 

“The first phase of the project was digital enablement, where the company helps customers work with them on their own terms,” John says. “The second phase is more operational, modernising how we ensure that our operations are as efficient and as advanced as they can be so that there are no major service issues.”

Virgin Media Ireland is also working on further developing its Full Fibre project, which has been a catalyst for the second phase of transformation. The project helps roll out full fibre broadband to more homes and businesses across Ireland.

John explains how the project is a key programme for the company as it seeks to modernise its services and operations to provide the best connectivity services in the market.

“The Full Fibre project and investment in that project has allowed us to have a long, hard look at our OSS platforms and our service assurance, service provisioning platforms and really start again in relation to how they're structured,” he explains. “This is so they're fully automated and use the best-in-breed products to ensure that we're both finding our customer's challenges on the network efficiently, but also automating the resolution of those challenges as quickly as possible.”

Prioritising the customer

Currently, Virgin Media Ireland’s project is in its third phase, which looks at simplicity and agility around its billing systems and mobile platforms. John says this part of the process is to “finish off that end-to-end digital-first strategy”.

He adds: “We have a traditional billing platform and traditional customer order management platform that sits underneath our digital systems. This is the beating heart of how a lot of telcos operate with their customers and how we sell to our customers and how we make sure that we monetise those services.

“We're now replacing that platform, but it’s a good evolution from the previous phases where we are replacing the main order management and billing platform underneath the really strong digital services that we've built in the previous phase.”

For John, the customer is everything, as he explains that Virgin Media Ireland’s three-phase digital transformation project seeks to provide an overall better experience for the customer.

“If our customers are happy, if our customer services perform as they should, then we win all around,” he says. “The customer was at the forefront in the first phase. Providing simplicity and the ability for us to provide the best operational experience is all beneficial to our customers.”

Another way the company prioritises its customers is through empowering its staff and internal processes to continue along that transformation path.

“One of the first things we did on our journey was to understand the ways of working. So one of the first elements of upskilling was: How are we working together and how are we aligned?” John notes. “Our teams had to really understand how to work within that structure using the Scaled Agile “SAFe” delivery model. We needed a lot more product owners for instance. We needed release train engineers, which would be your traditional technical programme managers. 

“We required our team to be upskilled in these new ways of working and some people have earned great careers out of that upskilling journey.”

Likewise, on the technical side, Virgin Media Ireland has adopted numerous new platforms that it feels is the right blend between buy and build.

“We also have a separate parallel stream of building some of our key platforms, like our internal sales platform is all inbuilt,” John adds. “Our teams really had to upskill to use  those platforms we have bought, but also really understand those platforms we are building inside out so we get the most value out of that strategy.”

‘Family’ partnerships empower digital transformation

In order to spearhead the next era of connectivity, Virgin Media Ireland credits its partner ecosystem as a very important enabler for its successful digital transformation strategy. Notably, its partnerships with IT companies Infosys and Prodapt who work at great speeds to deliver a collaborative and successful environment.

“Our partnerships have helped transform our business,” John explains. “It was really important for us, with partners like Infosys and Prodapt, to create an atmosphere where they knitted into our team seamlessly.

“We worked through issues together because the speed at which we were moving to deliver these transformations was quite fast,” he adds. “We didn't have time for challenges or issues in relation to the teams knitting together, so a ‘family’ approach was something we laid down from day one and, in fairness to our partners, they really embraced that.”

Both Infosys and Prodapt have large levels of experience to bring to the table, which Virgin Media Ireland was keen to utilise. Their large practices in networks or digital delivery and consulting were very important to the company as their expertise was not just beneficial for the delivery of services, but also Virgin Media Ireland customers.

“The speed at which they operate, and the speed at which they can scale in relation to delivering high quality, also benefits our customers,” John comments. “Their ability to test and bring scale to the table so that we deliver the best solutions possible is an obvious advantage.”

When it comes to Virgin Media Ireland’s three-phase digital transformation plan, Infosys is the prime system integrator of the programme, managing the governance of each programme. It takes on the responsibility of delivery, particularly when it comes to customer order management, billing and the digital space.

“They essentially make sure that the demand coming towards our technology teams is properly structured, architected and fed off to the other teams,” John explains. 

On the other hand, Prodapt is responsible for delivering transformation around service assurance, provisioning, and Intelligent OSS, so they are closer to the network. Prodapt came in with their open source accelerators, which have become an integral part of our tech stack.. John explains that having two complementary roles in this way has worked well as Virgin Media Ireland has navigated relationships between the two partners.

“If a process has a mechanism by which we fully link everything we do to that business need, then whatever Infosys and Prodapt deliver has to link back to that – which the Scaled Agile framework ensures,” he says. “There's a very clear way within our business to ensure that they're delivering that simplicity we need.”

This was actualised via the company’s Full Fibre project which was not only very complex, but went live in record time. John credits this journey to these partners, which Virgin Media Ireland leveraged to ensure a speedy success.

“One of their unique strengths is scale, but I think to ensure that speed of success, it goes back to understanding those partners and whether they're willing to operate in that family ethos, whether they're truly willing to operate as partners or just as a project delivery and a transactional mode,” John explains. 

“Bringing experience to the table offers the ability for them to supplement my own team’s great experience and knowledge to offer varied solutions to keep things on track. I will now always go back to that partnership family ethos. 

“Once we're all on the same page, once we're all working together, we always give ourselves the best shot at success.”

Setting and maintaining high standards

For the last several years, Virgin Media Ireland has implemented major transformation efforts and shows no signs of slowing down. Now, the company is eager to leverage its innovations to better serve its customer base. 

Looking ahead, John is optimistic about the company’s future trajectory as it seeks to bring new products and ideas to its customers. 

“What's next for us is always that customer focus,” he says. “We want to continually evolve the best digital experiences for our customers to support our fantastic products. 

“We get great opportunities to investigate new products and new ideas. But I think, primarily, for me, it's always about the customer experience. You can always make the customer experience better, delight them with different features on our app for instance. 

“Now that we're ahead with our major transformation, it's now about hunkering down and focusing on how we can make that customer experience better, week by week, month by month.”

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