Demand Satisfaction!

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 trenches”, 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.

This is the second interview with a speaker/panelist that will be at Customer Service is the New Marketing in February of 2008. Today’s interview is with Patti Roll, who is officially the Director of Community Sourcing and eCommerce with the hip bag company Timbuk2. She will be on the Customer Service as Community, Community as Customer Service panel at CSTINM.

We’ve been making custom messenger bags in San Francisco since 1989. That’s pretty unique. In the late 90’s we developed our first web-based custom bag builder and we became part of Adobe’s dog and pony show for Flash. They’d project the bag builder on a big conference screen, design a bag and drop it in the cart. We’d get the order, build the bag in our manufacturing facility and send it to the conference by bike courier. Very cool and not much different than how it all happens today.

I got involved with Timbuk2 when I was a buyer at a bike shop in Palo Alto called Wheelsmith. During that time, my Timbuk2 service contact was this cat named Anthony. Any time I called to place a bag order there was a 50/50 chance that Anthony was in a good mood. A few years later, I was hired as a dealer service rep at Timbuk2 and the very same Anthony was my trainer. Back in 1998, all six of us office folks sat directly above the sewing floor. It was noisy as hell and we had our company meetings in the founder’s bedroom, which was adjacent to the “office”. Messenger bags were becoming cool and we were trying to keep up with demand. It was a great time to be with the company. I came back to Timbuk2 in February 2007 when Perry Klebahn joined as CEO. The office has more people and a conference room that doesn’t double as a bedroom, but the vision for the brand is sharper than ever.

Customer service is important to us because we’re committed to creating a profoundly personal experience for our terrific customers. Whether it’s the custom bag they designed, the packaging that was included, or the voice in the order confirmation – the stories they tell are what keep the Timbuk2 brand meaningful and relevant. With the evolution of social networks, these “word of mouth” stories have amplification like never before and are the purest form of marketing simply because they are unsolicited and based on personal experience.

I really think I have the coolest job because the Timbuk2 offices are walking distance from my house in the Mission, San Francisco and every morning I spot at least 5 people with Timbuk2 bags heading to their own offices. It isn’t uncommon for me to head downstairs from the office to give at least one weekly impromptu tour of our manufacturing facility – a real treat for folks who’ve never seen how we make a Timbuk2 bag.

I have a long history with Timbuk2. Back when we were small it was easy to make our customers happy because they walked through the door on Treat Street and talked to us every day. We’re bigger now and are blessed that the Internet provides a new “front door.” It allows us to stay close and transparent to our ever-growing customer base.

As told to Douglas Hanna.

Remember that the last day to take advantage of Early Bird pricing ($295) for Customer Service is the New Marketing is December 31. After that, the price goes up to $495. Now is the time to act if you want to take advantage of the lower pricing. As always, all the details can be found here.