Virgin Trains.

UK: InterCity West Coast franchisee Virgin Trains has been able to improve passengers’ satisfaction with boarding, seating and on-board entertainment by working with customer relationship data company ITG Creator and using Qlik’s visual analytics platform.

More than 200 000 responses to surveys e-mailed to people who had booked tickets through the Virgin Trains website were collected, with 300 000 comments captured, analysed and then visualised using an ‘Awesometer’ app. This is available to 700 Virgin Trains staff who can identify problems and take action, and the app provides trend analysis, customer loyalty and sentiment by station, train, route, hour, day, week and month.

‘We’re all about putting our customers at the heart of what we do’, said Chris McDermott, Advocacy Manager at Virgin Trains. ‘That means making changes to our business based on what our customers tell us is important to them. To do that, we like to use the best tools in the industry to better understand what our customers are asking for.’