The Virgin brand is a truly remarkable one, just have a look at this article :
June 29, 2021
When Virgin Atlantic launched in 1984, the airline’s distinctive red color scheme and playful advertising set it apart. As the years went by, Virgin Atlantic continued to introduce game-changing innovations into the aviation industry, from seatback TV screens to the use of more sustainable fuel. “Virgin Atlantic has always been about providing amazing customer service and disrupting the industry,” says Ash Jokhoo, Chief Data and Information Officer at Virgin Atlantic. Today, the company’s next big disruption is taking off with a commitment to digital technology that charts new directions in customer service.
We chose Microsoft 365 to support the innovation that will keep Virgin Atlantic on the leading edge of the aviation industry.
A digital transformation with a Virgin Atlantic spin means the company embraces innovative technology that employees use to stay connected—even as their work takes them to new destinations every day—and never lose sight of the customer experience. “How do we use technology to reinvent the industry’s aging, legacy systems and get new ideas to market quickly?” asks Jokhoo. “The key is to look at new technology from the customers’ perspective.”
Virgin Atlantic chose to bring its digital transformation down to Earth with Microsoft 365. “We chose Microsoft 365 to support the innovation that will keep Virgin Atlantic on the leading edge of the aviation industry,” says Jokhoo.
Accelerating the response to COVID-19 with Teams
Just as Virgin Atlantic’s digital transformation began to take off, COVID-19 arrived, bringing with it huge challenges for airlines around the world. “We were in the fight of our lives at Virgin Atlantic,” remembers Jokhoo. To ensure business continuity, Jokhoo and his colleagues accelerated their planned rollout of Microsoft Teams, launching the collaboration tool overnight. “Teams was fundamental to our survival,” says Jokhoo.
For Virgin Atlantic, the normal speed of business accelerated as the company dealt with the challenges of a rapidly evolving global economic and health crisis. “We used Teams to make decisions faster, recording meetings, transcribing and sharing them with people instantly,” says Jokhoo. “That rate and scale of collaboration was essential, and it couldn’t have happened without Teams.”
Virgin Atlantic saw this disruption in the industry as a perfect time to make changes for the future and set the company up for success as people began to fly again. “It wasn’t just tech for tech’s sake,” says Jokhoo. “Accelerating the adoption of workplace tools and new workflows meant we gained efficiencies and achieved significant cost savings. Not only did this add to our survival story, but it suggested a way for the future.”
Case in point: with the majority of employees on furlough, Virgin Atlantic turned to Microsoft Power Automate and Teams to compensate for the loss in productivity and respond to an overwhelming surge of customer requests for refunds. ”Our refund system is more than 15 years old, and not designed to handle that volume of activity,” says Jokhoo. Virgin Atlantic employees collaborated in Teams to develop Power Automate workflows to streamline and allocate workflows for employees and ensure key tasks were completed. “By automating refund allocation processes, we maintained the refund system at a level it wasn’t designed for,” says Jokhoo. “Without Power Automate, I would have had to spend months writing and testing code to give us that capability.”
Virgin Atlantic also used Microsoft Power Apps to create an app that automated the manual process of signing up for furlough. “We needed a solution fast because we had to deliver the first round of furlough payments on time,” says Jokhoo. “Our team built a custom app with Power Apps in a few days.” The alternative was time-consuming and manual—a process that would have created headaches for the employees who needed to take advantage of the furlough scheme. “None of our existing systems had the concept of furlough, which employees legally have to sign up for,” says Jokhoo. “In a few days, our team had an app ready to gather approvals, relay them to the government, and input it back in our system. It shows how powerful Power Apps can be.”
Creating new ways of collaborating and working with Microsoft Teams
Even before COVID-19 brought Virgin Atlantic’s need for modern collaboration tools to the fore, Shaun Yazdanpanah, Head of Technology Services at Virgin Atlantic, and Ryan Buchan, Service Delivery Manager at Virgin Atlantic, were part of a team looking to promote technology within the organization. “The main challenge we face is a very disparate workforce,” says Yazdanpanah. So, when a 2018 employee survey turned up a widespread desire for improved companywide communication, the technology organization immediately looked to Teams to fill the gap.
For years, Virgin Atlantic had used Skype for Business for collaboration and video conferencing, but Jokhoo and his colleagues in IT knew that Teams would be a better fit as the organization suddenly moved to working remotely for the first time. “When we moved into crisis mode in early 2020, it was clear that on-premises Skype for Business was never going to survive the volume of use we were seeing,” he says. “And, as the features and stability of Teams got better and better, we wanted to go with that momentum.”
Positive feedback from within the organization made it clear that the new tool was a great fit. “We knew we would move to Teams, but COVID-19 accelerated our timeline,” says Yazdanpanah. “Now that we have seen the benefits, Teams will play a key role in new hybrid-work scenarios.” Today, Virgin Atlantic employees are preparing for a flexible return to the office that includes the use of Teams to stay connected and deliver on business outcomes, no matter where colleagues collaborate from. “HR has already made hybrid work documentation available that includes tips on getting the most out of Teams,” says Buchan. “It’s important to have platforms in place that support colleagues feeling safe and secure as they return to the office,” adds Yazdanpanah.
Teams appealed to Virgin Atlantic’s vision for a digital transformation because it streamlines collaboration by bringing a host of tools together in a single digital space. “Teams is so much more than standard chat and meeting functionality; it’s evolved into a hub for real-time collaboration across channels, file storage, live events, and even Microsoft Planner and Azure Boards,” says Yazdanpanah. “As we work through COVID-19 challenges and adjust to its aftermath, it’s a welcome time to have these tools at our fingertips.”
Virgin Atlantic employees on furlough, or working from home, use Teams to manage the dramatic shift in their work habits. “Some employees do one month on and take one month off of furlough, while others work from home consistently,” says Yazdanpanah. “Today, Teams is an indispensable tool for employees returning from month-long stints on furlough.”
“My team created a Kanban board in Teams with buckets that show what everyone has been working on,” adds Buchan. “Now, when furloughed employees return to work, they don’t have to read through long emails to catch up with what has been happening—all the information is available in Teams, and they can jump straight back into work.”
For Buchan, Virgin Atlantic is just getting started with Teams. “Ideas are sparking across the business about how we can use Teams to underpin our digital transformation and open up lines of communication further,” he says. “We are already discussing how we can equip engineers out in the field with Teams on their tablets. They could be on the tarmac maintaining a plane and receive messages via Teams, rather than having to sit around a meeting room to receive communications.”
Reinventing meeting productivity and corporate culture with Teams
In the past, individual teams used Ajera ERP software or lengthy email chains and in-person meetings to get up to speed and collaborate on projects, spawning something the organization refers to as “the meeting monster.”
“Teams removed the culture of having meetings for meetings,” says Buchan. “It’s just so much easier to spin up a group chat and start working together from there.” Early in the pandemic, the management board met with management teams for two hours, every day. “Using Teams, we quickly got into a cadence of meeting for 45 minutes,” says Jokhoo. “This is a fundamental benefit in terms of making business-critical decisions faster.”
To keep Virgin Atlantic’s unique corporate culture strong, employees use Teams to stay engaged with their colleagues. “It’s just nice to have fun with the virtual background and GIFs,” says Yazdanpanah. “We have had virtual coffee breaks, pub nights, and even a virtual goodbye party for a colleague who was leaving for another job opportunity. We made a custom background featuring a photo of that person and used that during the party. Little things help us carry on the fun that’s so important at work.”
It was also important that furloughed employees could take part in company communications and updates. “Teams live events are a great addition,” says Yazdanpanah. “We use them to make sure that everyone at Virgin Atlantic feels included in regular company communications, even from home.” Employees also use Teams to promote wellness during stressful times. “Having the ability to go for a walk and take a meeting on your phone really helps people manage the home-office work style,” says Buchan. “The Teams mobile app keeps everyone’s morale up when they work from home.”
Streamlining processes with Microsoft Power Platform and Teams
The aviation industry, for all its technical innovation, is often bogged down by legacy technology and outdated manual processes. Clare Andrla, Senior Manager for Automation Enablement at Virgin Atlantic, is part of a team dedicated to using Microsoft tools to help combat that trend. “We saw the demand for automating processes and creating apps go up exponentially,” she says. “So, we focused on becoming a center of excellence for low-code solutions, and we chose Microsoft Power Platform because we wanted to encourage everyone to become a citizen developer.”
Andrla is also busy promoting the interoperation between Microsoft Power Platform and Teams. “Creating an app in Power Apps directly in Teams is a much better experience for everyone,” she says. “We just developed an app within Teams for the Engineering and Maintenance department, and we have citizen developers all over the enterprise writing their own apps in Teams.”
The Engineering and Maintenance app is designed for use at Virgin Atlantic’s aircraft hangars where engineers work in a highly mobile environment. The app displays the status of each aircraft regarding scheduled maintenance, so engineers can prioritize the right aircrafts and ultimately reduce the amount of ground time for each plane. Employees can also view the app on the hangar’s Microsoft Surface Hub device to help plan their day. “With the app we developed in Power Apps through Teams, we manage our fleet better and have a clearer picture of potential delays related to aircraft maintenance,” says Andrla. With that holistic view of the fleet, Virgin Atlantic employees have reliable insights to share with customers, alerting them about delays as soon as possible.
And, in just a few weeks, Andrla and her team used Power Apps to build an app called “Space Checker,” designed to manage the flow of employees returning to the office. “We use the app with a SharePoint back end to allocate each departmental area on a specific day,” says Andrla. “Employees can use the app to pre-book when they’re going to come into the office.” Using the Space Checker app to facilitate a safer return to the office, Virgin Atlantic employees are ready to adopt a hybrid work model.
Supporting a digital-first approach with Azure Machine Learning
While Andrla and her team work to promote automation across the business, Simon Speck, Head of Strategy, Data and Architecture at Virgin Atlantic, is behind a digital-first approach that helps the business make the most of its data. “We focus on producing data products and making our information available for self-service,” says Speck. “We also touch on business enablement, where we use Microsoft Power Platform and data products to create front-end apps for our ops team or frontline workers.”
Harnessing and centralizing data is a key part of becoming a digital-first organization and delivering better service to customers. Speck and his team created a predictive model that optimizes seat-pricing based on historical data. “Using Azure Machine Learning, we built a tool our analysts use to gauge the pricing of a flight against an ideal revenue and load factor,” says Speck. “With that insight, they can make better, more data-driven pricing decisions. The goal is to reduce the risk of over or under-booking a flight.” The next phase of the project, which is already underway, is to start incorporating Power BI and Power Apps into the interface to make it even more intuitive and flexible for stakeholders.
Speck and his colleagues benefit from the interoperable nature of Microsoft tools. “We encourage people to create new apps or automations directly from Teams,” he says. “It’s very useful to be able to invite colleagues to a team and have a conversation right alongside the app or dashboard in progress.”
The Data Science and Engineering team also uses Microsoft Forms to gather suggestions for new solutions and automatically store that data in Azure Boards, part of Azure DevOps. “The culture of measuring outcomes and taking a data-driven approach is really gaining momentum at Virgin Atlantic,” says Speck. “Azure, Microsoft Power Platform, and the Microsoft 365 tools have been central to that approach.”
A foundation of leading-edge security with Microsoft 365
For any airline, security is fundamental. “Flying safe is the backbone of the airline industry,” says Jokhoo. That focus on security encompasses the safety of physical airplanes and the protection of the IT landscape. “Endpoint security is extremely important to us,” says Jokhoo. “Microsoft Defender for Endpoint was a natural fit for us because we were already invested in the ecosystem.” We really pushed hard, even through the crisis, to make sure that we delivered great endpoint security and further reinforced our privileged access management.” The IT team also uses automated investigation capabilities to help the relatively small team respond to threats more quickly. “We punch above our weight in terms of size,” says Jokhoo. “We use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to make sure we look at the right things at the right time. It’s heightened our diligence.”
Elevating customer service with new digital experiences in the future
Deploying the leading-edge collaboration tools in Microsoft 365 is just the start of an ongoing journey for Virgin Atlantic, one that Yazdanpanah thinks has the potential to help the airline deliver on its mission to become the most loved travel company. “To achieve that vision, it must apply to all departments in the company, and technology underpins a lot of that,” he says. “Thanks to our ongoing digital transformation powered by new technology, we’ll enable every department to be the most loved department, engaging with customers in a way that makes every interaction with us that much more enjoyable.”
Virgin Atlantic uses Microsoft tools to help make this ambition a reality through innovative, customer-focused services, such as a customer query bot for the Virgin Atlantic website built with Power Virtual Agents. The company knows its investment in digital tools will help it ensure that every customer touchpoint reflects the high standards of an airline that flies on its reputation for stellar service.
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