Business Situation Virgin Mobile India’s management needed to visually review multiple performance indicators in real time to ensure effective call centre operations, yet relied on manual processes that delivered unreliable and outdated performance information. Solution The team developed a visual performance dashboard using Visio Professional 2010 and SharePoint 2010 to dynamically link Visio to the company’s external contact centre data, which enabled access to near real-time performance data. Benefits 2,880 hours and approximately 600,000 INR of annual labor savings related to manual report generation 5% improvement in percentage calls answered due to effective online variance reporting Clear visual presentation of near-real time performance data improves governance and removes operational/system inefficiencies, whether onsite or remote Improved call success and customer satisfaction Overview Virgin Mobile India’s call centre management needed to review important performance indicators in real time to ensure effective operations. However, their performance-report development processes were cumbersome, requiring manual data extraction, manipulation, and conversion to a visual form for presentation. To address this challenge, Virgin Mobile India developed a visual performance dashboard using Microsoft® Visio® Professional 2010 and Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 to dynamically link Visio to their external call centre data. The new solution provides dynamic, data-driven call centre dashboards that graphically illustrate performance through out-of-the-box functionality. Virgin Mobile India expects to realize a number of benefits from the Visio 2010 solution, including 2,880 annual labour hours saved, a 5% improvement in percentage calls answered, and increased customer satisfaction.
Situation Virgin Mobile, a leading branded venture capital organization, is one of the world's most recognized and respected brands. Conceived in 1970 by Sir Richard Branson, the Virgin Mobile Group has gone on to grow very successful businesses in sectors ranging from mobile telephony, to transportation, travel, financial services, leisure, music, holidays, publishing, and retailing. Virgin Mobile has created more than 200 branded companies worldwide, employing approximately 50,000 people, in 29 countries. Its revenues around the world in 2008 exceeded £11 billion (approx. US$17 billion). Virgin mobile services are being offered to consumers by Tata Teleservices through a brand franchise with the Virgin Group. Virgin Mobile India is an association between Virgin Group and Tata Teleservices, wherein Virgin Mobile India will provide Tata Teleservices with experience and expertise in designing, marketing, and servicing of “Virgin Mobile” branded products for the youth segment. Virgin Mobile India has its own call centre operations in India, which management considers a key competitive differentiator. Virgin Mobile India’s call centre operations are made up of four separate contact centres, staffed by approximately 600 employees. As with all call centres, Virgin Mobile India’s call centres generate large quantities of data which must be collected and analyzed to be of use to company management. Current Challenge Virgin Mobile India’s call centre management needs to review many important performance indicators in real time to ensure effective call centre operations, such as call volume, the number of agents on the call floor, the geographic distribution of incoming calls, and other data. From this data, Virgin Mobile India call centre management relies on a number of daily and weekly standalone graphical Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Queue reports to review trends, analyze performance, and support decision making. One of the key challenges Virgin Mobile India’s call centre faces is the timely and efficient development of the IVR and Queue reports. Their performance report development processes were very manual in nature, requiring data extraction from multiple data sources, which in turn needed to be manipulated and converted into a visual form for presentation. The process was very time consuming and error prone, limiting the reports’ value to call centre management. Though performance dashboards did exist in the call centres, they were not accessible remotely.
Management would have to ask operations managers on the contact centre floor to publish status reports every two to three hours to report performance. Each time a report was developed, two to three people would extract, analyze, and visually present the performance data; each report would generally take 30 minutes to generate. Virgin Mobile India wanted a dashboard that could both provide visual insight into real-time operations at each of the four call centres and be accessible remotely. To address these reporting challenges, Virgin Mobile India turned to Microsoft® Visio® 2010. Solution To design their solution, Virgin Mobile India’s operations division started with five key contact centre performance reports, which addressed metrics such as call volume, number of agents, call resolution, call abandonment, and variance. With their key performance indicators required for the solution identified, the team set out to design a visual performance dashboard using Visio 2010. The Operations team developed a performance dashboard using Visio Professional 2010 and Visio Services in Microsoft SharePoint® 2010 to dynamically link Visio to its external contact centre Oracle IVR data, which enabled them to display near-real time performance data. The new solution provided users with dynamic, data-driven call centre dashboards that visually illustrated each contact centre’s performance through out-of-the-box functionality of Visio 2010 and Visio Services. Virgin Mobile India selected Visio 2010 to drive its solution for a number of reasons, including the ability to visually represent performance data, ease of use, and simplified back-end data integration. According to Carl Ambrose, CIO of Virgin Mobile India, “There were many reasons why we chose Visio. I think the clincher for us was being able to visually represent all the information we wanted so that it would be easier for users to actually see the data. Any issues will catch your eye very quickly, because you can review performance graphically.” “Visio is very easy to use without customization, and because it is very similar to other Microsoft® Office programs our end-users can quickly adapt and start using the tool,” explained Rajesh Negi, Project Manager, Virgin Mobile India. Benefits Virgin Mobile India expects to realize a number of significant benefits from their Visio 2010 solution, including 2,880 annual labour hours saved, a 5% improvement in percentage calls
answered, and an increase in customer satisfaction. Visio 2010 serves as the visual to the contact centre operational performance data, providing users with both real-time performance visibility and the ability to drill down to additional detail when necessary, either remotely or from their desks. According to Sanjay Singh, General Manager of Operations, Virgin Mobile India, "The Visio 2010 capability to quickly place real time contact centre call data onto SharePoint Server2010 has helped the Operations Team multifold. Now we can compare call trends and monitor KPI’s [Key Performance Indicators] like answered calls, percent variance, percent abandoned, etc., and work towards effectively resolving any service quality issues much faster to drive customer satisfaction.” The new Visio 2010 solution will also eliminate the manual multi-step data extraction and reporting process. Across the five daily performance reports developed by each call centre, Virgin Mobile India estimates the solution will save 240 hours per month, or 2,880 hours annually (approximately 600,000 INR). With the new solution in place, management now has automated reporting of near real-time and reliable data in a dashboard format to increase effectiveness of contact centre operations. Virgin Mobile India estimates that these improvements, including a 5% improvement in percentage calls answered, will drive improvements to key performance indicators such as variance and billing, and help improve customer satisfaction by reducing any negative trends in calls answered. Microsoft Visio 2010 The advanced diagramming tools of Microsoft® Visio® 2010 help you simplify complexity with dynamic, data-driven visuals and new ways to share on the Web in real-time. Start by building your diagram with a diverse set of professional-looking templates and modern, pre-drawn shapes. Then, easily link your diagram to popular data sources (such as Microsoft® Office Excel®). You’ll see data automatically refresh right within your diagram, reflected in vibrant visuals such as icons, symbols, colors, and bar graphs. Finally, with just a few clicks, publish your data-linked diagram to Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010, and provide access to others on the Web, even if they don’t have Visio. Together, simplicity, shapes, and Web sharing make Visio one of the most powerful ways to see and understand important information. For more information about Microsoft Visio 2010, go to: