Virgin Atlantic sharpens customer journeys with ChatGPT Work

Virgin Atlantic is using ChatGPT Work to help its teams understand the airline’s complex customer journey and deliver better experiences faster. From competitive research to product planning and analytics, ChatGPT Work gives employees new ways to bring information together and move from insight to action.

For an airline, the customer journey extends beyond just booking a flight. It includes browsing, purchasing, checking in, traveling, the onboard experience, and sharing feedback afterward. Each stage produces valuable information, often held across different systems and reporting tools. Virgin Atlantic is using ChatGPT to connect those signals and help teams decide where to focus.

Turning weeks of research into hours

As Virgin Atlantic developed its new five-year strategy, its digital product team needed a clear view of the competitive landscape. Traditionally, assessing multiple competitors across a detailed customer journey could take weeks of manual research.

Using ChatGPT Work, the team created a structured framework and asked it to research competitor experiences, trace available customer journeys, and organize its findings into a dataset for review. The team could start the work in the morning, return a few hours later, and begin evaluating and refining the results.

“As part of Virgin Atlantic’s five-year digital strategy, ChatGPT Work has helped us explore customer journeys and market experiences in a more structured and efficient way,” says Nathan Bolt, Head of Digital Product at Virgin Atlantic. “It enables our teams to compare journey patterns, surface opportunities, and turn insight into product decisions far faster than before. What might once have taken weeks can now be accelerated into hours, helping us focus investment where it can make the biggest difference for our customers.”

The analysis helped Virgin Atlantic identify areas where its digital experience was performing strongly, capabilities it needed to protect, and opportunities that warranted further investment. Those findings informed recommendations for the company’s five-year plan.

ChatGPT Work also helps the team synthesize strategy documents, customer insights, and digital experience data, making that information easier to explore and apply throughout the product lifecycle. “ChatGPT has allowed us to go from idea to actual product in customers’ hands much faster,” Bolt says.

Creating a connected view of the customer journey

Virgin Atlantic’s customer experience and analytics teams face another challenge: bringing together data from many sources. Previously, employees had to navigate several dashboard tools, authenticated workspaces, licenses, user profiles, and report suites to understand different parts of the journey.

With ChatGPT Work and ChatGPT Sites, Virgin Atlantic is creating secure, authenticated dashboards that bring disparate datasets into a common interface. Employees across the business can access relevant views, explore information more easily, and make decisions for their own areas.

“The ability to have a single interface that is customizable, that we can control and visualize in a way that we’ve not been able to before, has been game changing for us,” says Miles King, Head of Customer Experience at Virgin Atlantic.

The team has also used ChatGPT to create custom product-planning tools. Product teams can manage roadmaps, prioritization, fields, and quarterly planning in a way that fits Virgin Atlantic’s needs, while senior stakeholders can see simplified, high-level views. This flexibility helps teams spend less time adapting their work to rigid tools and more time delivering the roadmap.

“ChatGPT has really turbocharged our insights, understanding, and the ability to make decisions that ultimately enhance the end-to-end customer journey for our guests.”

—Miles King, Head of Customer Experience at Virgin Atlantic

What’s next

Virgin Atlantic sees more opportunities to bring ChatGPT Work into employees’ day-to-day work. Bolt already uses it as a “chief of staff” to surface important items across his calendar, Slack, and email, help him take action, and prepare presentations.

“I’m able to do more within the same workday,” he says. “I’m not working longer hours necessarily, but I’m getting more done.”

As its use of ChatGPT Work expands, Virgin Atlantic will continue focusing on turning insight into faster decisions and better experiences for its customers. As King puts it, “ChatGPT helps me spot what customers need, decide what matters, act faster, and deliver.”