Virgin Mobile UAE Case Study

Virgin Mobile UAE

Virgin Mobile UAE is part of one of the world's most recognized telecommunication brands. The company services customers across the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and receives over 1,000 support requests daily. Virgin Mobile UAE's support team focuses on delivering value for money, constant innovation, and exceeding customer expectations—which means offering a world-class mobile experience.

Business Challenge

Virgin Mobile UAE is a digital app-based business unit with no physical stores; every touchpoint a customer has—from a purchase to a support discussion—is a digital experience. The team knew digitizing their customer support interactions would differentiate them from other telecom players who still rely on traditional support mediums like phone calls and emails. The goal was to provide a 100% digital customer support experience with in-app chat-based interactions that would allow support agents to interact with customers at precisely the points when they were in-app and had questions regarding phone plans or mobile phones.

In traditional support chats, the user must send a message and wait for an agent to respond. After the chat ends, the session is closed out. If the user asks any follow-up questions, they must start the process repeatedly, and a new session begins. This requires the customer to give a certain amount of dedicated time to the support resolution. Virgin Mobile UAE wanted the interaction to be more flexible, almost as if the customer were texting with a friend.

On the customer side, the team sought a native chat experience integrated into the mobile app and would provide users with real-time support when needed. Customers should be able to quickly start a conversation and get real-time responses from a support agent. Once the conversation is initiated, customers can continue at their own pace and availability in the same chat thread, even if they are unavailable for a response.

For agents, the objective was an intuitive and easy-to-use agent (or service desk) interface that could reduce first response times to chat requests and improve agent productivity. Supporting customers across multiple channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc., from the same agent interface would be game-changing.

However, building chat internally would remove development resources from the company’s core app and be cumbersome to maintain, requiring continuous upgrades to keep up with industry-leading developments. As such, the team decided to search for a suitable chat vendor that could power the experience for them.

Why Virgin Mobile UAE Chose Sendbird

After evaluating multiple technology vendors, the team chose Sendbird for its integrated messaging solution that ties both the customer and agent experience together in a mobile-first environment. Virgin Mobile UAE implemented the Sendbird Chat API in its app to create an embedded support chat experience, enabling agents to respond to multiple customer queries quickly within one place.

With Sendbird, Virgin Mobile UAE customers can conveniently request support through a native chat experience within the Virgin Mobile application. Sendbird Chat delivers a personalized, engaging, and continuous chat experience for customers with features like typing indicators, the ability to share images and rich media files in the chat thread, and read and delivery receipts so customers know when their messages have been sent and read, similarly to texting a friend on a public messenger application like WhatsApp.

Results

Implemented in only two weeks, Virgin Mobile UAE has entirely digitized its customer support experience with Sendbird, and effectively replaced phone and email-based support with native chat-based support in their app.

Virgin Mobile UAE agents can now respond to support requests in seconds with Sendbird's intuitive agent interface. The multi-channel support feature funnels support requests across social and chat channels into one central location. An automatic routing system assigns incoming support tickets to available agents for faster response times. Agents can also tag a support ticket into a particular category and use quick replies to send pre-written responses to customers' general questions.

Sendbird simplified the Virgin Mobile UAE team's support workflow and increased productivity and responsiveness, increasing customer satisfaction scores from 91% to 96% for support.

The Virgin Mobile UAE team also uses a Sendbird Desk feature called Proactive Chat, enabling agents to reach out to customers before a support case occurs. Examples include:

• Contacting accounts that are about to expire to secure renewals.

• Offering customers better long-term plans that will save them money.

• Upselling new plans to customers based on customer usage data.

Proactive Chat has improved customer satisfaction and retention and opened a new revenue channel for Virgin Mobile UAE. Their support agents now act as consultants and concierges who can assist customers in buying new plans and packages.

Furthermore, the introduction of Sendbird's FAQ Bot has significantly reduced the volume of customer contacts that Virgin Mobile UAE agents handle. Using asynchronous messaging allows agents to engage with as many as six customers at a time, drastically increasing operational efficiency. The non-AI FAQ Bot has resolved an average of 4,251 messages per month without manual intervention, resulting in a 26% reduction in customer support requests handled by agents. Ultimately, with Sendbird, Virgin Mobile UAE has saved on headcount for at least 35 full time employees.

Ozgur Gemici, Senior Product Manager at Virgin Mobile UAE, concludes, "With Sendbird, we provide a 100% digital customer support experience for our customers with native in-app chat-based interactions. Our customers are more engaged and consistently give us a CSAT score of 5/5. My advice to anyone digitizing their customer service would be to consider Sendbird as a strategic partner."

1) Since day one, Sendbird has partnered with AWS to establish itself as a leading conversations platform that enables a secure, global, and scalable in-app conversation experience. Sendbird is an AWS advanced tier technology partner operating 45+ AWSnative services in 9 regions. Thanks to Amazon’s AWS Auto Scaling and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud services, Sendbird manages massive digital traffic sending billions of messages monthly. Using Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Route53 geolocation functions, Sendbird ensures reliable global traffic distribution. Sendbird also leverages AWS CloudFormation to automate its servers’ management in each region efficiently. Lastly, AWS Elasticache and Amazon Aurora allow Sendbird to achieve millisecond latency and data storage for over 300 million monthly active users. Sendbird’s world-class conversation platform architecture and technical foundations are certified by AWS.