Michael Murphy is the Group Brand Manager for Customer Service at Virgin. Michael’s featured talk at Customer Service is the New Marketing is “Virgin’s Crown Jewel: Customer Service, across 200 Companies and 29 Countries.”
I started out 15 years ago “in the trenchesâ€, working at a 24 hour call centre for Visa globally handling lost and fraud travellers’ cheques claims. That first role touching customers and dealing with different people in different languages got me hooked – I intend to never lose contact with that, as to me, it’s the most critical part of a business.
I moved on to work across many industries, invariably supporting customers in multi-lingual environments and usually 24 by 7 operations. Moving up the ladder, I headed to Citibank, Exodus, and Accenture over time. I worked briefly in the USA, the Netherlands and France. With the need for a new challenge, I moved to South Africa where I took up my first role with Virgin.
I started working for Virgin in a small office in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa. I met the newly appointed COO at Virgin Mobile South Africa for an interview at his house. I sat in shorts and t-shirt in the COO’s back garden, holding a beer in one hand and his young child on my knee and I realised that people and their lives outside work were an important part of the people at work. Virgin Mobile South Africa had only just been formed a couple of months earlier, and on arrival at the office on my first day, it was straight down to mapping the end to end Customer Experience with the Chief Customer Officer (once the Team got used to my British accent).
Once you know what your customer journey looks like, you avoid the bad habit of building the processes around system and people constraints. You put the customer first to ensure a differentiated experience. Whilst I understood the whole Virgin way, applying that in a new country and understanding what Virgin meant to the South African consumer was a great learning experience for me. Right from the recruiting stage – where we made sure every candidate had a brilliant experience as well as a thorough interview- to the less than typical board meetings – including one where we had Coco the Clown paint the faces of all the executive team – we built an exceptional customer experience which resulted in a lot of changes in the South African mobile market (as we do everywhere we go) and we handpicked some exceptional people to deliver this.
Virgin people aren’t always the typical choices, they often don’t fit a mould, but what they all show is passion for customers and a creative flair to make a difference.
After a couple of years, I was ready for a fresh challenge and moved back to the UK to take on a new role as head of customer service for Virgin Group. In this role I help the new business to set it up right, support existing business as they grow and evolve, own the global benchmarking of our standards around customer service and drive the global customer service strategy for the group.
I’m not often in the office and my day often starts out with a train or plane journey. I try to spend as much of my time as I can with the businesses, meeting with all layers of the business from the front line to the board room.
I run a lot of workshops, forums, brain storming and best practice sharing sessions, because my role is to help the businesses to continue to improve the customer experience. It’s great to share the good stuff that we have done around the group, but equally rewarding to listen and learn from each business. In every business I visit, whatever the challenges and opportunities, the best part is time with the front line people. No matter where they are or what they’re doing, they represent the face and the voice of Virgin and they are the ones who truly make the Virgin difference.
I love my job because we do make a difference. The people who work at Virgin never lose their passion and spark. As I spend time with each business, I gather together some of the stories of how we love our customers – we call them Goldfish Stories. These are actual events that happened, which show how we fixed things when it had all gone wrong, or how we thought outside the box to find a customer solution.
It’s not enough to have great service and innovative products, you’ve got to love what you do, and only then can you deliver the sort of service that Virgin customers have come to expect. It is that notion that ends up making the biggest difference to our customers.
As told to Douglas Hanna.
Tickets are still on sale to Customer Service is the New Marketing. The one day summit in San Francisco is going to be taking place on February 4, 2008. Check out the web site for a full speaker lineup, schedule, and more information.
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