Straight-up, heartfelt service is one of the core values that defines Virgin Active as a brand. This explains why, when one of the world’s leading health and fitness club operators noticed a growing preference for customer service on social media channels, no time was wasted in adopting a tool that would streamline operations and ensure responsive social customer service.
DataEQ’s social customer service platform, Engage, optimises workflow and identifies the priority posts that require an urgent response, routing these to the right agent in the team. Replacing the traditional community management approach that Virgin Active had historically used, this prioritised workflow enables agents to effectively deal with the rising number of online queries and increased social conversation, ensuring that no customer query goes unanswered.
Improvement in response rate
Since onboarding Engage’s prioritised ticketing system in November 2020, Virgin Active saw a marked improvement of 25% in monthly response rate. This improvement was despite periods of significant spikes in priority social media conversation. In the period from November 2020 to January 2021 Virgin Active’s priority tickets increased by 23.6%, yet their response rate improved by 19.8 percentage points. 
Reduced response time
In addition to improving response rate by 25%, Virgin Active also saw a marked improvement in response time. At the time of onboarding in November, average response time exceeded 30 hours. Virgin Active was able to take almost 30 hours off the average time it took to respond to customers in January, despite the 23.6% increase in queue size experienced during this month. 
This means that, despite the spike in volume of priority tickets between November 2020 and January 2021, during which ticket volumes peaked, Virgin Active still managed to achieve higher response rates and lower response times. The difference between the average monthly response rate from November to January is shown in the below graph.
Previously, our agents were responding directly on social platforms, which came with all sorts of complications and pitfalls. By streamlining our efforts, Engage has completely systemised Virgin Active’s social customer service offering, which has ultimately made our agents’ lives much easier. The tool is stable, intuitive and comes with the added benefit of a great technical support team who goes above and beyond to provide immediate and personalised service - this enables us to offer the same superior level of assistance on our social platforms at all times.