Virgin Atlantic Recognized for Customer Experience Excellence with Medallia and Kantar Program

Recent award success cements strong partnership, lays foundations for program expansion beyond CX to incorporate brand insights.

Medallia, Inc., 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) program – 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 program powered by Medallia Experience Cloud and delivered by Kantar. This program 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 program 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 center 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 program 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 program is essential to bringing customers’ voice into the heart of the business, and we work closely with Kantar to elevate the insight from the program into tangible actions that make a difference to our customers and our brand every day.”

The program 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 organization and deliver more personalized experiences to their customers,” said Ben Brewer, Chief Revenue Officer at Medallia. “Through combining its customer experience and brand insights, Virgin Atlantic is truly prioritizing 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.’”

About Virgin Atlantic

Virgin Atlantic was founded by entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson in 1984, with innovation and amazing customer service at its core. In 2023, Virgin Atlantic was voted Britain’s only Global Five Star Airline by APEX for the seventh year running in the Official Airline Ratings. Headquartered in London, it employs more than 8,500 people worldwide, flying customers to 30 destinations across four continents throughout the year.

Alongside shareholder and Joint Venture partner Delta Air Lines, Virgin Atlantic operates a leading transatlantic network, with onward connections to over 200 cities around the world. In February 2020, Air France-KLM, Delta Air Lines and Virgin Atlantic launched an expanded Joint Venture, offering a comprehensive route network, convenient flight schedules, competitive fares and reciprocal frequent flyer benefits, including the ability to earn and redeem miles across all carriers. Virgin Atlantic joined SkyTeam in March 2023 as the global airline alliance’s first and only UK member airline, enhancing the alliance’s transatlantic network and services to and from Heathrow and Manchester Airport.

Virgin Atlantic has been pioneering sustainability leadership for more than 15 years, committing to Net Zero by 2050 and continuous action that reduces environmental impact. The airline operates one of the youngest and most fuel-efficient fleets in the skies, with an average age under seven years. In October 2022, Virgin Atlantic welcomed the first of 16 A330-900neos to the fleet, continuing its transformation towards 100% next generation aircraft by 2028. In November 2023, the airline led a consortium to deliver the world’s first flight across the Atlantic on 100% Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), demonstrating that 100% SAF can be used safely as a drop in fuel in existing infrastructure, engines and airframes. The need to scale production is an industry imperative and Virgin Atlantic is committed to radical collaboration across the energy chain to support commercialisation ahead of 2030.

For more information visit www.virginatlantic.com or via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @virginatlantic.

About Medallia

Medallia is the pioneer and market leader in customer, employee, citizen, and patient experience. As the leading enterprise experience platform, Medallia Experience Cloud is the mission-critical system of record that makes all other applications customer and employee aware. The platform captures billions of experience signals across interactions including all voice, video, digital, IoT, social media, and corporate-messaging tools. Medallia uses proprietary artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to automatically reveal predictive insights that drive powerful business actions and outcomes. Medallia customers reduce churn, turn detractors into promoters and buyers, create in-the-moment cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and drive revenue-impacting business decisions, providing clear and potent returns on investment. For more information visit www.medallia.com.

© 2024 Medallia, Inc. All rights reserved. Medallia®, the Medallia logo, and the names and marks associated with Medallia’s products are trademarks of Medallia. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

About Kantar

Kantar is the world’s leading marketing data and analytics business and an indispensable brand partner to the world’s top companies. We combine the most meaningful attitudinal and behavioural data with deep expertise and advanced analytics to uncover how people think and act. We help clients understand what has happened and why and how to shape the marketing strategies that shape their future. For more information, please get in touch with press@kantar.com.

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