The client

Virgin Wines was founded back in 2000 and is now one of Europe’s largest independent online wine retailers selling over 750,000 cases of wine each year to over 250,000 customers across the UK. They work directly with small independent winemakers, and avoid mass produced supermarket wines. Their focus is on high quality, handcrafted wines made by passionate people, at great prices! Their wines cannot be found in supermarkets and the vast majority are exclusive to them.

Essentially, their aim is to take away the general “snobbery” of the Wine industry in order to provide honest, high quality and fairly priced wines for the everyday drinker. With RSVP’s help, they have a growing consumer base on their flagship products – the Wine Bank and Discovery club – as well as an increasing number of customers who deal directly with their Wine Advisor team. These three ways of buying wine provide the diverse service that’s needed in a fast changing industry.

Services provided

RSVP provide a 100% risk and reward sales service to Virgin Wines on every one of their continuity schemes and products. With extensive experience of working in the Wine Industry, we also provide on-going consultation on customer profiling, marketing strategy and campaign development.

RSVP’s agents contact all segments of the Virgin Wines customer base, and in order to be able to this effectively, our agents must be able to build rapport with all types of individual, as well as talk comfortably and passionately about very specific and diverse wine preferences. With this in mind, several key members of RSVP management team have official wine qualifications. This enables RSVP to provide a unique service to Virgin Wines as the combination of the extensive sales experience and the inter-personal skills that they bring as actors, ultimately mean a first class customer experience and fantastic results.

Results

When using an outsourcer to provide frontline communications with customers, clients understandably feel there is an element of risk. Having said this, – the combination of our agents (professional actors with the ability to build rapport and empathize with all walks of life) and our unique experience within the Wine industry – ensures that RSVP continues to vastly exceed expectations. The key metric to analyse the success of the work we do with Virgin Wines is the conversion percentage. The initial test was to contact previous continuity customers who last ordered between 2 and 6 years ago. When contacting this type of customer, a 10% conversion is considered a success – however RSVP very quickly established daily metrics of between 25% and 35% (and continues to do so). It was clear that there was a real affinity with the Virgin Brand, the specific promotion as well as RSVP’s agents. Our agents were a perfect fit to the Virgin brand, and the better than anticipated results have continued. Our partnership has gone from strength to strength and RSVP are now are an integral part of their business, re-recruiting almost 20,000 customers and subsequently playing a huge part in Virgin Wines recent growth.