Recent award success cements strong partnership, lays foundations for programme expansion beyond CX to incorporate brand insights.
Medallia, the global leader in customer and employee experience, and Kantar today announced that their partnership with Virgin Atlantic has been awarded the “Best Use of Customer Insight” accolade by the Institute of Customer Service. The award marks a key milestone for the British airline as it now embarks on a new phase of its Voice of the Customer (VOC) programme – connecting its Customer Experience (CX) and brand data. This will provide Virgin Atlantic with a comprehensive view of its customers’ experiences to inform meaningful change and strengthen the company’s brand.
Medallia and Kantar have been working in partnership with Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Atlantic Holidays since 2018, with the airline’s VOC programme powered by Medallia Experience Cloud and delivered by Kantar. This programme captures customer feedback across each interaction, presenting a real-time, unified view of the customer experience across the brand’s operations.
Virgin Atlantic’s VOC programme will now be combined with Kantar’s Meaningfully Different framework to measure the value of brand equity accumulated in the minds of the airline’s customers. When linked with the data gathered through Medallia Experience Cloud – which captures signals across in-person, digital and contact centre interactions – this will provide powerful and rich insights to help inform meaningful customer change and help the airline’s brand to grow in strength. Other features of the programme include Medallia Video, which captures video customer stories, enabling Virgin Atlantic to identify emerging trends within its vast data sources and put action-oriented insights at the fingertips of key decision-makers.
“At Virgin Atlantic, we’ve been focused on building an insights framework that leverages customer feedback on both a macro and micro scale – motivating frontline teams while simultaneously guiding our overarching customer strategy and where to focus investment,” said Dale Haworth, CX Insight Analyst, Virgin Atlantic. “The Medallia-powered VOC programme is essential to bringing customers’ voice into the heart of the business, and we work closely with Kantar to elevate the insight from the programme into tangible actions that make a difference to our customers and our brand every day.”
The programme data enables Virgin Atlantic to confidently make business decisions and kick off new internal improvement campaigns – focusing on food & beverages, seats, and cabin crew – to provide more points of differentiation from other long-haul airlines. By combining the insights from its Medallia-powered VOC platform with Kantar’s Meaningfully Different Framework, Virgin Atlantic will now be able to understand how these individual experiences affect brand perception, with the rich insights informing change to deliver a meaningfully different experience for customers.
“We are proud to continue working together with Virgin Atlantic in order to further weave customer-centricity into the fabric of the organisation and deliver more personalised experiences to its customers,” said Ben Brewer, Chief Revenue Officer at Medallia. “Through combining its customer experience and brand insights, Virgin Atlantic is truly prioritising data-driven decisions and ensuring that the Virgin Atlantic brand continues to be synonymous with excellence.”
“Combining the power of the Medallia platform with the highly validated, incisive lens provided by Kantar’s Meaningfully Different Framework is creating a whole new wave of customer insight,” said Piers Lindsay-Taylor, Senior Client Partner at Kantar. “Understanding how Virgin Atlantic experience and brand ‘feed’ and ‘frame’ each other is already unlocking exciting new opportunities to further boost the brand’s famous wow factor. Along with Medallia, as a proud partner to Virgin Atlantic, we are thrilled to use innovative thinking like this to unlock growth and truly bring to life the brand vision of ‘seeing the world differently.’”
