Meet the Virgin Media workers keeping people connected: Luke

The internet has played an even more important role in everyday life since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and Virgin Media Business has been working hard to keep people connected.

Luke Martin is a service delivery operations manager who works with Virgin Media Business’ public sector and enterprise customers. He helps manage the delivery teams installing services and co-ordinating work to get people connected.

Since the coronavirus pandemic started his role has changed significantly: “With blue light services, hospitals and other front-line services receiving priority upgrades, I have been reprioritising to ensure the projects that are most important are delivered as quickly as possible,” Luke said. “We have also had to work with customers where we have had to put work on hold and ensure that when the time comes we are ready to serve them.”

At the start of the lockdown, the Virgin Media Business team found a huge increase in the number of coronavirus-related escalations. “Our amazing customer care team worked with our activate team, who do all of the remote configuration for customers. They completed any ‘quick wins’ that did not need to go through the delivery process,” Luke said. “Then we prioritised any urgent COVID-related work and ensured it followed an expedited process. Finally, we had to review our stack of approximately 6,000 live orders and prioritise them in line with the government advice, making sure we were supporting our key workers.”

Many NHS customers have been among the key workers that Luke and his team have been supporting. That work has included organising upgrades to lines serving the NHS Nightingale field hospitals, boosting call answering capacity for major care home providers, and supporting NHS trusts needing more connectivity so employees can work remotely.

“I’m so proud of how we’ve worked during the pandemic,” Luke said. “It’s been a huge team effort – we have a great relationship with the NHS, and we were keen to support the urgent requests as quickly as possible, and streamline some of the service. As well as my team in service delivery, our customer care, activate and field teams deserve immense credit for how well they’ve pulled together and done so much.”

He added: “The feedback from customers has been amazing – they can’t believe what we’ve been able to do for them.”

Read about other Virgin Media employees who have been going the extra mile to keep people connected.

Visit Virgin Media Business to find out more.