Virgin Media Ireland + Celonis

Virgin Media Ireland deployed Celonis in the Order-to-Activation process – which many of its team members had tried to improve in the past. With full process visibility, Virgin Media Ireland can now identify challenges, prioritize them, and direct resources to resolve those that have the biggest impact for customers. The next step is agentic orchestration: using AI to fix problems before customers even realize they have them. As Director of Service Operations Glen Winn says, “that’s the power of AI with PI”.

Context: From academia to enterprise

Virgin Media Ireland is part of Liberty Global, and is the leading connected entertainment cable and broadcast business in Ireland, delivering broadband, TV, mobile and phone services to both consumers and businesses.

The company traditionally used process mapping and Lean Six Sigma to understand its processes. But it realized the process maps were missing certain steps and variants within its most complex processes, so they didn’t always reflect reality.

While undertaking a post-graduate qualification in the digitalization of business and industrial processes at the University of Limerick, Glen Winn, Director of Service Operations at Virgin Media Ireland, encountered the work of Professor Wil van der Aalst. This introduced him to process mining and ultimately Celonis, as a way to better understand and improve processes.

Winn brought this knowledge to the Virgin Media Ireland CFO, who agreed to run a proof of concept to explore how Celonis could provide true process visibility, identify improvement opportunities, and enable resolution.

Challenge: Order-to-Activation is a tricky process

For the proof of concept, Virgin Media Ireland started with the Order-to-Activation process. The team knew there were issues in the process, and they wanted to reduce waste and rework. But they couldn’t see the scale of those problems, where they were occurring in the customer journey, or the resulting impact on the customer experience.

Teams had previously been using scripts or workflows to triage to customer accounts, and fixing issues as they arose. They weren’t necessarily focusing on highest priority items that would have the biggest impact for the customer.

Winn explains there was a lot of interest from stakeholders: “I was conscious of the fact that other people had tried to solve this problem in the past but challenges remained, so the business was really intrigued to see what we could find.”

Solution: Fixing the biggest issues for the customer

By deploying Celonis in the Order-to-Activation process, Virgin Media Ireland gained far greater insight into the root causes of the problems they were already aware of, such as order delays. Their operations teams can now quantify the size and frequency of those problems, and understand what interactions the customers are involved in as a result of fractured journeys. The team also identified new issues they didn’t previously know about, and multiple opportunities to fix issues, delivering real business value.

Now, using Celonis, Virgin Media Ireland is able to identify the most pressing challenges within the Order-to-Activation process, prioritize them, and assign resources to fix those that will have the greatest impact. Each operations team has a bespoke Celonis dashboard view they can use, enabling them to prioritize intelligently, and drive the best outcomes for their customers.

Following the success of the Order-to-Activation proof of concept, there’s demand from multiple stakeholders to bring additional data sets into Celonis and deliver a more holistic view of the process. Winn says, “We've already identified at least three or four other data sources that we want to import into this model to enrich the data and give a better output for our organization.”

Vision: Moving into agentic orchestration

The next step with the Order-to-Activation process is to move into agentic orchestration. Using Process Intelligence (PI), AI agents at Virgin Media Ireland will be able to fix any issues that are identified, ideally before the customer even realizes they have a problem, and dramatically improve speed-to-resolution. Initially, AI agents will run alongside human agents as assistants, then co-pilots. Ultimately AI agents will fix issues directly.
In addition to optimizing the Order-to-Activation use case, and moving into agentic orchestration, Virgin Media Ireland are also looking to expand Process Intelligence into other use cases such as ITSM, with the support of their Celonis value engineer.

“One thing I like about Celonis is they actually partner with you and make sure you maximize the value of the software by leaving a value engineer with you”, Winn says. “I think that's very unique and we’re getting great benefit from that relationship. It's a great model and I wish other vendors would do the same thing.”