Background

During the VWO ConvEx’25 interviews, Chris Gibbins, Chief Experimentation Officer at CCX, sat down with Charlotte Golding, Head of Experimentation at Virgin Media O2, to discuss the brand’s experimentation programme.

Virgin Media O2 is one of the UK’s leading telecommunications providers, serving millions of customers across web, app, communications, and contact centre channels.

The experimentation team focuses primarily on the existing customer experience, with personalisation playing a key role in how the business improves engagement, retention, and conversion across the customer lifecycle.

The Opportunity

As experimentation matured, Virgin Media O2 recognised that a traditional, siloed CRO model was limiting impact. Personalisation efforts needed to better reflect customer context, including lifecycle stage, mindset, and channel preference, while experimentation needed to scale beyond the website into app, communications, and service channels.

The business also wanted to improve alignment between experimentation, product, analytics, and research teams, ensuring experiments were clearly tied to shared objectives and real customer problems.

The Approach

Creative CX works closely with Virgin Media O2 to support both strategic alignment and technical enablement across experimentation and personalisation.

Virgin Media O2 evolved from a siloed CRO team towards a more centralised Centre of Excellence, with a clear ambition to move into a hybrid model embedded within product teams.

A core part of this shift has been the introduction of Opportunity Solution Trees (OSTs), which bring product owners, researchers, analysts, and experimentation specialists together around shared customer problems and objectives.

Creative CX also supported Virgin Media O2 with the rollout of server-side experimentation, enabling testing and personalisation beyond the web, including app experiences, communications, and future call-centre journeys. Alongside the technical setup, CCX provides ongoing training and enablement to ensure teams understand not just the tools, but how to apply rigorous experimentation methods effectively.

The Impact

Virgin Media O2 has significantly reduced silos between experimentation and product, creating stronger alignment around shared OKRs and customer problems.

Experimentation now supports highly contextual personalisation, factoring in lifecycle stage, mindset, channel preference, and next-best-action logic.

Experimentation is now expanding across channels, supported by server-side capability, stronger stakeholder engagement, and a growing culture of test-and-learn across the organisation.