Virgin Media Ireland keynote at PegaWorld iNspire 2023: Virgin Media Ireland: Becoming a Fully Digital Business

Virgin Media Ireland has a grand design: to become a fully digital business. As the leading broadband provider in a highly competitive market, that plan demands a highly organized strategy to deliver simplified, yet hyper-personalized engagement and service to every customer. Join John Walsh, Director of Technology Transformation, as he breaks down the organization’s strategic approach to digitalization – including how it uses Pega’s customer service desktop, case management, and AI-based decisioning – to simplify customer service and realize amazing results.

Transcript:

Raphael de Souza:
John, I know I saw you throwing shapes last night. How are you?

John Walsh:
I'm great. I'm great, Raphael. Delighted to be here in PegaWorld. Really enjoying the conference, really enjoying the energy at the conference, and yeah, loved hackathon last night. That was good fun. I don't know if I was throwing shapes, though.

Raphael de Souza:
Okay. Well, you seem surprised that there was another Irishman at Pega.

John Walsh:
Yeah. Great to meet more Irish people at Pega and delighted to be able to come here from Ireland and tell everyone our story, Virgin Media story.

Raphael de Souza:
Well, on that point, John, just give us a bit more about you, your role at Virgin Media Ireland, and of course, for people that don't know Virgin Media Ireland, a bit of a background.

John Walsh:
Yeah. Really excited to be able to tell everyone our exciting story from Virgin Media and my own story, too. So Virgin Media Ireland, we're part of the Liberty Global Telecommunications Group. We were founded in 2005. We offer broadband internet services, digital telephony, digital TV services. We're the largest cable TV provider in Ireland, and we also offer mobile services through an MVNO operation. Interestingly, we also have a TV division, Virgin Media Television. We broadcast five TV channels in the Irish market, four free to air, and that's a really exciting part of our business. My role in Virgin Media Ireland is I lead and head up essentially the IT and technology transformation and delivery, and I work very closely with our product business teams on a day-to-day basis to roll out our multi-year transformation strategies.

Raphael de Souza:
Okay. So let's bring this to life a bit more. What are some of the goals of Virgin Media Ireland, and I guess the pillars of your strategy?

John Walsh:
Yeah. A number of years ago, we realized as a business we needed to transform. We were a traditional telco and a lot of voice call and essentially traditional operations, and it was very clear to us that we had to become a truly digital business. And that was when our digital first program was launched. The goal of our digital first program really was to simplify, and that word's really important, but simplify and digitize the operations across all our channels and to provide real great self-service experience. Very importantly for us, we also wanted to make sure that that core contact channel of voice became the best experience possible. And that's where we were very adamant it was digital first and not digital only. We also had an objective in the program to start to centralize our data, centralize our processes, centralize our experience. We knew we needed to do that. How? Not quite sure just yet, but we knew we needed to do that.

Raphael de Souza:
Digital first. I love that name. But look, if we take the rose-tinted glasses off, it may seem good and all that, but what are some of the roadblocks you came across and what steps did you actually take to overcome them?

John Walsh:
Yeah, yeah. And I think Pat said I nearly ran him out of the business when he first joined, so I'm glad he stayed and I'm glad he didn't leave that time when I showed him that IT architecture when we first met. But yeah, look, we had a lot of fragmentation and complexity in our systems, as many companies do, but the fragmentation was not helping our contact center operations. It was not helping our conversations with our customers. It wasn't helping us simplify, that word is so important to us, simplify those channel experiences. And look, we also then had a lot of legacy platforms in place, as many companies and many telco companies do, and they were becoming quite inflexible. They weren't helping us achieve the strategy we needed to achieve. And essentially, we knew we had some challenges on our hands.

Raphael de Souza: That's fantastic. A lot of people here can relate to your situation, but if you could give us a bit more about your approach and break down those steps a bit more, that would be really helpful.

John Walsh:
Yeah, yeah. Because a program of this size, you need to step back. You need to do this and look at it in the bigger picture and not just go straight for the technology. So the first pillar for us was people. And again, some of these things might sound like cliches, but they're not. We had to stop, look at how we were set up as a team, our operations teams, our customer-facing teams, our product teams, our delivery teams, and were we agile enough? Were we ready to work together in an iterative fashion? So that was our first big step and to make that commitment to each other. The next big step for us was methodology. It was during the time of lots of agile methodologies, lots of great ideas in that space. So we looked through a lot and we landed on SAFe, for anyone here at the conference, used that scaled agile framework, and it really clicked very much with what we wanted to do.
It was very much outcomes driven, very much economically driven, portfolio driven, and it also allowed that three-month incremental program increments to work with our business and have those handshakes and be very clear where we were going with our strategy. And then the last pillar, last but not least, and we're at a technology conference, is technology, and we had to solve that fragmentation issue. We had to find a technology that ticked most of the boxes that we had to solve, and it had to be flexible enough to adapt to our multichannel needs. And here's one of the most important points. It had to work in harmony with those BSS and legacy systems. We were not in a place to do a mass transformation and replace those BSS systems or core systems or billing systems, so this product had to work in harmony with them, and that was a key element.
Look, for anyone that's around, we've flown over more people from Ireland, and Terry and Stuart are here, and they're going to do a breakout later and take people through in a bit more detail if they want to hear a little bit more about those three pillars and that journey.

Raphael de Souza:
Okay. Well, first of all, thank you for that breakdown, people, methodology and tech, of course, and the must-see breakout, so nobody miss out on that. But can you tell me how did Pega actually fit into all this?

John Walsh:
Yeah. So let me go on a little journey and I'm also going to take some liberties and show you guys a beautiful picture from back home in Ireland. So this is the gap of Dunloe. So anyone that's ever visited Ireland, you might know this, but if you haven't, I'd recommend to visit the Gap of Dunloe. I asked the guys to put in this slide because I liked it. Number one, I thought it was a pretty slide, but number two, I think it's a good analogy of what we needed to do. We had to cross a pretty big bridge at the start. We had to pick a good technology. And within Liberty Global, a lot of our markets had the same challenges, whether it's our Telenet or our Sunrise or our different teams in Liberty Global. So we had similar challenges. So we got together and we went through a large selection process and we landed on Pega and we're very happy we did.
Pega simply ticked all those boxes that I mentioned earlier, and that was a key element for us. Once we had that step done, then essentially we went through a number of steps and hopefully, this is helpful for anyone embarking on a digital transformation journey now with Pega at the heart of that. Business architecture and stopping and working with our business, looking at our processes and very much working hand-in-hand with our partner Emphasis, who I must give a big shout-out to who have been fantastic on this journey with us from day one. So for any of the Emphasis people in the room. But even more important than Emphasis, our business. We needed to sit with them, work out a plan, work out an incremental roadmap that would really land our business design with case management and CDH at the core.
The next big step for us was we founded in Liberty Global, but also in Ireland, and I was part of founding that myself, the Liberty Global Center of Excellence and that Center of Excellence, I would recommend to anyone starting on a journey like this, particularly if you have multiple teams or multiple divisions. To be able to work to common rule sets, to high standards, to be able to reuse code, reuse the levels and the rule sets in the layer cake. All of that was crucial to us and it gave us a great catalyst to move forward. And then we got into the exciting stuff. We started to land big deliveries, and our first big delivery was customer service and our customer 360 agent desktop. Integrated with telephony really seamlessly. Some key core case management flows at the start, and it was just a game changer for us.
As Pat and Terry mentioned in the video, we went from seven, eight platforms down to one almost overnight, and we haven't looked back from there. The next big step for us, and that was maybe two and a half years ago, not long after Pat came in and had that fright. And 12 months ago, we then launched CDH. We'd been working on that in parallel, but we wanted to launch that at the right time, and that's been a great development as well for us. The customer decision hub is something that's going to evolve all the time, and hopefully we'll get to somewhere where Fimber and Rabobank are someday, but it's a very exciting step for us as well and we've a good team working on that. And just six months ago, we've launched Pega Chat, and this is really important for us. The Pega Chat combined with Pega customer service drives that simplicity we need. And having all of your cases, your interactions driving through the same place is exciting. And look, the future journey for us is more channels, taking chat as far as we can take it, and introducing new case management flows.

Raphael de Souza:
So I just want to pick up on that. I really love that. What has that meant or what's the impact been for your customers and also the customer experience?

John Walsh:
Yeah, yeah. No, it's a good point. I think, look, there's so many impacts and there's so many great things that have happened with Pega, everything in every area, commercially, customer service, but there's two I'd like to really hone in on and have a good discussion about because I think these are two of the most important. The first is meaningful customer experiences. So for us, AHT, average handling time, it's important, but it's not the most important thing for us. The most important thing for us is to be able to have all of our information in the right place if calls are coming in, if chat conversations are coming in, so that we can talk and have a great conversation with the customer.
And if that conversation needs to go on a little bit longer, that's fine, but once it's meaningful, it's engaging. That's the biggest thing for us. And that's been proven through by, as the guys said earlier, again, in the video, 20% reduction in transfer rates. It's one of the most frustrating things, being transferred when you ring to a contact center, and that's primarily down to Pega and the ability to have that information at our fingertips. Our relation NPS is increasing all the time, and we're very confident that Pega is at the heart of that, allowing that great conversation, increasing that NPS.

Raphael de Souza:
Did you say 20%?

John Walsh:
Yeah, 20%.

Raphael de Souza:
Excellent. Amazing results. Amazing results. But you also mentioned the agent experience. Can you tell me a bit more about that?

John Walsh:
Yeah. Everything can't be better, but this is maybe a little bit better. The agent experience for us is we've now gone to one system now to manage seven systems. And for me, for our agents to be coming to the office to be happier with the systems, it just means we've less attrition, people are happier working with us, they're more engaged. Up to 95% of our agents now use Pega exclusively. And I think pretty soon, we'd be up to probably a hundred percent, just some of the last flows being moved out. And the other key thing to call out is training. We can now trust that we can train our agents in up to three weeks instead of four weeks now, a 20% saving in training. We can get a new agent who's joined our company onto phone calls or onto chat dealing with our customers in 20% less time, and that's just great for us.

Raphael de Souza:
Amazing. These are great outcomes, but any of the results you just mentioned, did any of them surprise you?

John Walsh:
Yeah, look, I'm going to stick with the agent experience again. I think just my office in Limerick in Ireland is quite close to the contact center, and to see those agents happier and content in their job and content with our IT systems, I never thought IT systems would make people happy or sad, but they do. And I think it's important they come and they enjoy their job and when they're happy, our customers are happy, and it's win-win all around.

Raphael de Souza:
Yeah. Look, incredible results, but what would you say are some of the biggest takeaways?

John Walsh:
Yeah. Look, the biggest takeaway is the collaboration. And this is another buzzword, but you truly have to work on that. You truly have to bring teams together and make sure that if there's any tension or any challenges, you have to bring your operations teams, your product teams, your delivery teams, your project management office. Everyone needs to come together and collaborate together. That's what digital transformation needs first and foremost. And it truly is a collaboration, and that's where you'll get to your goals.

Raphael de Souza:
It's interesting. This actually came up in a conversation I had yesterday with my customers, Willis Towers Watson, who are here. For other enterprise leaders that are going through a similar sort of transformation journey, what advice would you give?

John Walsh:
Yeah, yeah. And I did mention commercially driven earlier, but one thing that's really important is don't be too impatient for immediate results, especially on a multi-year transformation. And we probably factored in a little bit too much immediate results and expecting overnight, and I said, yes, we launched the customer service and that was fantastic. But commercially, you have to just plan out and be more patient in relation to that. Like Pega is a fantastic product. Low code can deliver very quickly, but on a big transformation when you're changing the ways of working, changing your operation, plan out a little bit more patience into your results and into your forecasting, I think.

Raphael de Souza:
Excellent. I wish I had that map of Dunloe, that thing in front of me.

John Walsh:
Gap of Dunloe. Gap of Dunloe.

Raphael de Souza:
Gap of Dunloe. Sorry. Sorry about that. The Gap of Dunloe. So on that point, just if we look into the distance, the Gap of Dunloe, what's on the roadmap?

John Walsh:
Yeah. We've a very exciting roadmap right now, and Pega, again, is at the heart of that. Look, the first thing we're doing right now, Virgin Media Ireland, we're launching a full fiber program in the Irish market right now. We actually launched three, four weeks ago, which is very exciting, full fiber to our customers. And Pega is allowing us to build the new core platforms under our new OSS, BSS, our operational, our service assurance, service provisioning platforms. Pega is, I use this term giving us the air cover. It's giving us the air cover to get in underneath to do those major platform transformations as we need to do them, and the full fiber transformation is a good example of that. The next big step for us is Pega Cloud. We're moving our platform onto Pega Cloud. We've tried to keep our Pega in our on-premise solution up to the highest versions of Pega, but we're very excited about going to Pega Cloud stability, the support, the performance, and getting all that really exciting stuff that Kareem mentioned yesterday as well. That's going to be pretty cool when we go to the Pega Cloud. And last but not least is that self-service experience. It's just exciting now. Talking about generative AI, we're already doing POCs with some of the Pega team, with the Emphasis team, with Pega Chat, with generative AI. We're very excited about that, and I think customer services and our customers are just going to benefit so much on that. So yeah, AI-supported self-services is something we're particularly excited about.

Raphael de Souza:
John, listen, I've had a good time talking to you about this. Thank you for everything you've been sharing, and we're looking forward to an exciting future with you guys. Listen, I wish you the best moving forward, and since you've met your Irish colleagues, et cetera, any chance of Guinness or anything?

John Walsh:
I think so. I still haven't found a bar in the MGM that serves Guinness, so if anyone knows of a bar in the MGM that serves Guinness, we'll find one. Raphael said he'll pay the bill, by the way.

Raphael de Souza:
Whatever. We'll figure it out.

John Walsh:
We'll figure it out.

Raphael de Souza:
Ladies and gentlemen, John Walsh.