× Virgin Active

Lorikeet Overview for Virgin Active

AI-first contact centre. Replace the IVR, close the loop on the high-volume journeys, and free the team for the calls that matter.

Prepared for Rob and Elliot Wood · 29 August 2026
Alex Holder & Robbie Tilleard, Lorikeet

The Opportunity

Turn the contact centre from a queue that deflects into a triage that resolves. Kill the abandonment rate, take 45 to 60 seconds out of the IVR, and shift 21 agents from repetitive volume to the calls that keep members with you.

Replace the deflection tree

Today the IVR sends members round in circles for two minutes before the queue. AI intent detection triages in one turn and routes to the right skill, or resolves the call without a human at all.

Close the abandonment gap

3,250 abandoned calls a month evaporate the moment the IVR gets out of the way. Elliot's own target of 15 to 20% call-volume reduction becomes a floor, not a ceiling.

Tagging that's actually accurate

Manual tagging sits at 40% accuracy today. The AI tags every call from its own read of the conversation, so the reporting Elliot uses to plan is finally trustworthy.

21 agents on higher-value calls

Keep the team size; change what the team spends its day on. Longer, better conversations on cancellations and complaints. Complaints routed to your experienced agents. New starters aren't first on the phone to a furious member.

State of Play at Virgin Active

~13,000 calls a month, 21 agents, 25% abandoned. Call volume up 4.7% year-on-year; live chat adoption down 15%. The IVR itself burns two minutes of most callers' patience before they reach the queue
The IVR is a deflection tree, not a triage. Three of five options hang up on the member. The other two route to the same team. Lost property, junior bookings, and day-pass calls all end up in the same place
Call tagging sits at ~40% accuracy because it depends on agents clicking the right dropdown after every call. Reporting is unreliable, planning is guesswork
Q4 the pilot window; 2027 the full transformation. £200k budgeted for the all-singing suite, already through multiple reviews. Country director backs a solid live chat function

Three closed-loop journeys we can automate end-to-end for the Q4 pilot:

Day pass deflect, tell the caller in one turn that day passes are not sold, offer guest pass or a club tour, route the tour to sales with the club preference on the ticket
Lost property capture, authenticate the member, collect item + club + date, log the report to the club's duty team with a structured internal note ready to action, confirm the 24-hour follow-up window
Overseas access capture, authenticate the member, collect destination + travel dates + clubs of interest, hand to the Overseas team with the member's tier pre-loaded (rather than guessing eligibility)

The three journeys we've already built for you

Live in a Virgin Active sandbox today. Same brain across voice, chat, and email. Ready to run against your real Freshdesk and telephony in the Q4 pilot.

Day pass deflect

Non-member calls asking for a day pass. Today they get one of the IVR options that hangs up. Tomorrow the agent says in one turn: "we don't sell day passes, but here are your two real options" — guest pass details straight from your knowledge base, or a routed handover to the sales team with the caller's club preference already captured.

Deflection with an outcome. Turns an abandoned call into a sales lead.

Lost property capture

Member calls to report a lost item. Today: IVR → unstaffed live-chat form → ticket → automation → club duty team → callback. Tomorrow: agent authenticates the member, collects item + club + date, files a structured note for the duty team, confirms the 24-hour follow-up. One turn, no form, closed loop.

The high-impact, low-effort journey Elliot called out. Handled without a human.

Overseas access capture

Member calls before a trip abroad. Agent authenticates, collects destination + dates + clubs of interest, notes their membership tier, and routes to the Overseas team with everything ready. Explicitly does not guess eligibility rules — captures the request and hands off with context, so the Overseas team gives a definite answer, first time.

Guardrail-first design. Automation where it's safe, hand-off where it isn't.

Also live for the pilot conversation, but not on the demo: better call tagging (from ~40% today to consistent), skills-based routing so complaints go to your experienced agents, and post-call summary + data-protection handling done by the AI, not the human.

Try the live agent yourself.

A mock Virgin Active support experience with the AI concierge embedded, running against three live Response workflows on a Virgin Active sandbox tenant. Real matching, real tool calls, real internal notes ready for the duty team.

Journey 1: Day pass deflect

Open the widget, type "do you sell day passes? I want to try the club before joining." The agent explains, offers guest pass or tour, and reassigns to sales with the caller's club captured.

Journey 2: Lost property

Type "I think I left my AirPods at Mayfair yesterday". The agent authenticates the member, collects the item + club + date, files a structured note for the club duty team, and confirms the 24-hour follow-up.

Journey 3: Overseas access

Type "heading to Cape Town in October, can I use my UK membership?" The agent captures destination + dates + clubs, reads the member's tier, and routes to the Overseas team with everything pre-loaded.

Three live workflows on a Virgin Active sandbox tenant. Powered by lookupMember mock and your existing Guest Passes FAQs article. Voice runs the same workflows on the same brain.

Open the live demo

virgin-active.demo.lorikeetcx.ai

Open the widget in the bottom-right and try one of the three journeys.

Appendix

Lorikeet overview, the team, investors, customer voice, architecture, POC plan, security, and pricing.

Lorikeet is building the leading AI concierge for complex businesses

One concierge, every channel. The agent takes actions in your systems, not just answers from a knowledge base — the reason contact centres in complex, regulated categories pick Lorikeet over Fin, Sierra, Decagon, and older IVR/NLP stacks.

Re: Using my Virgin Active membership in Cape Town

Virgin Active assistant

To: Karen Thompson (Mayfair Collection)

Hi Karen, I've logged your Cape Town trip with the Overseas team. They can see you're on Collection, that you're travelling 6–20 October, and that you're interested in V&A Waterfront and Sea Point.

They'll come back within one working day with the specific clubs your membership can access and what to bring on arrival. Anything to add before I hand over?

Email

Lorikeet

0:08

"Thanks for calling Virgin Active. We don't offer paid day passes, but there are two ways to try a club: a guest pass with an existing member, or a tour and trial session with the sales team. Which sounds right for you?"

SMS & Voice

I think I left my AirPods at Mayfair yesterday evening

K

Happy to help. Can I get your name so I can pull up your account?

Karen Thompson. Left them in the mat area after 6pm Reformer.

K

Logged with Mayfair duty team, they'll come back within 24 hours. Anything else you remember about the AirPods?

Chat

Our people have decades of experience with AI and building great products

CEO and Co-founder

Steve led product teams at Stripe and Watershed, building tooling to enable complex processes like carbon accounting and financial reporting at scale.

CTO and Co-founder

Jamie was a research tech lead at Google Brain, leading research on factual grounding in large language models. Third named author on Google's breakthrough 2022 LaMDA paper, and fourth named author on the 2020 predecessor Meena paper.

Our team comes from leading companies applying AI and driving large-scale corporate transformation

Lorikeet is backed by top global investors

We've raised over $50M from investors who backed Nubank, Klarna, Canva, Airwallex, Supabase, Midas, Clearscore and more.

Announcing our

$35M

Series A

Led by QED Investors

Blackbird

Square Peg

Capital49

Skip Capital

Airtree

Operator Partners

www.lorikeetcx.ai

Lorikeet consistently outperforms other vendors in the market

"We tested AI solutions head-to-head and Lorikeet was a winner in every metric."

Lindsay Boland

Product Manager, Flex

"We ran POCs with Fin AI, Decagon... Lorikeet was a clear winner."

Jiaona Zhang

Former CPO, Linktree

"Considered Sierra and other well-known players... [Lorikeet] could handle nuance, de-escalate emotional moments, and follow SOPs without breaking a sweat."

Jessica Mishlove

Head of Customer Relations, Arbor

Read case studies

Journey of a Support Ticket

How Lorikeet's AI agent resolves customer issues end-to-end

1

Customer sends message

Via chat widget, email, WhatsApp, voice, or ticketing system

2

Channel Intake

Mode (chat / email / voice / SMS) · Escalation rules · Auto-close config

3

Brand + Config Loaded

Virgin Active voice · British English · Member vs non-member context

4

Inbound Guardrail

Evaluate message → pass to triage, or escalate immediately

5

Intent Classification

AI matches customer intent against all available workflows

Matched Workflow

Run response SOP

FAQ Fallback

Search knowledge base

No Match

Escalate to human

6

Workflow Executes

Structured decision graph or Natural Language agent follows step-by-step SOP

Tools

Freshdesk · Membership lookup · Club directory · Booking API

Knowledge

Guest Pass FAQ · Membership FAQ · Racquets, Junior, Rewards articles

Actions

Freshdesk ticket · Internal note · Tag · Reassign to club team

7

Outbound Guardrail

Check AI response against policies → pass or escalate

8

Reply Sent to Customer

Brand voice · Formatting · Citations · Side effects (tags, CSAT, Slack)

If customer replies → loops back to step 5 with full context

If no reply → auto-resolved after idle period

Q4 pilot plan

4 weeks to a live cutover behind your existing IVR, on the three journeys you've seen today: day pass deflect, lost property, overseas access
Real Freshdesk, real telephony, real members, not another sandbox. Start with a percentage of live traffic and scale up as the numbers confirm what the sandbox already shows
Q4 pilot scope is a focused number, not the £200k 2027 all-singing suite; sized so Elliot walks it into procurement without escalation. If Q4 slips, the pilot becomes phase one of 2027
Guardrail-first. PCI-sensitive flows kept out of scope for the pilot, per Jamie. Everything the AI takes action on is auditable end-to-end

Configure & train

Integration & number port

Guardrails & live cutover

Week 1

We will:

Kick off with Elliot + Rob + your Freshdesk owner
Provision the Virgin Active production tenant, lift the three sandbox NLWs across, tune tone for British English
Baseline the current IVR abandonment and handle-time numbers you're measuring against

We need:

Elliot as day-to-day owner + a Freshdesk admin available for connect
Access to your existing knowledge sources (guest pass rules, overseas access policy, lost-property SOP)

Week 2

We will:

Wire the three journeys to real Freshdesk queues (club duty teams, overseas team, sales)
Port a UK phone number to run alongside the current IVR
Turn on AI call tagging over sampled live calls, benchmark against the 40% baseline

We need:

Freshdesk credentials + queue mapping
Twenty minutes with your telephony provider to authorise the number port

Week 3

We will:

Guardrail testing: no-answer paths, unrecognisable member, out-of-scope requests
Agent-in-the-loop on a small slice of live traffic (opt-in club or off-peak window)
Iterate on prompts and reassign targets from real conversations, not sim data

We need:

Two of your senior agents to review the first 50 real conversations
Jamie's PCI review completed for anything payment-touching (out of pilot scope, but reviewed for phase two)

Week 4

We will:

Live cutover: the three journeys handled by AI behind your current IVR, no menu tree in the way
Report on the numbers Rob will ask for: abandonment, handle time, tagging accuracy, reassign quality
Agree phase two: cancellations retention, complaints routing, KB build, wider rollout in 2027

We need:

Rob's sign-off on Q4 scope and the phase-two shortlist
A named exec sponsor to unblock any 2027 dependencies (ClubV, flexible cancellations, mobile app)

Lorikeet is built securely for enterprise

Compliance-grade architecture, day one. Designed for regulated platforms handling member PII, payment data, and GDPR-scoped records. EU and UK data residency available.

SOC 2 Type II
& ISO 27001

Both certifications independently audited. Your data is always protected and is never used for training.

GCP + VPC

Built on Google Cloud, running in a virtual private cloud. Audit-grade logging end-to-end.

Ex-Stripe security

Founding engineering team includes an ex-Stripe Staff Security Engineer. Security reviewed by industry leaders.

Handles regulated financial data

Already deployed with FCA-regulated subscribers and consumer platforms handling member PII, card data, and health information. UK/EU data residency available.

For Virgin Active's data posture: member PII, direct-debit records, health-consent flags, and the PCI-sensitive flows Jamie flagged all need careful handling under UK GDPR and PCI DSS. Happy to walk your security and legal teams through our controls during the pilot, including UK data residency, access controls, and incident response.

View trust center →

You only pay for resolutions

Aligned incentives by design, we both win when tickets are resolved.

Pay only for resolved tickets

Lorikeet charges per ticket successfully resolved, as determined by you. If we don't deliver, you don't pay.

No platform or per-seat fees

No setup costs, no per-seat licenses, no monthly minimums. The only line item is resolutions.

Volume discounts

Per-resolution price decreases as volume grows. Available across email, chat, voice, and SMS.

Aligned incentive structure

You buy credits from Lorikeet up front
Credits are only consumed when the AI reaches the desired outcome
You don't pay if the AI fails and the case is passed to a human
Credits sized to your forecast volume, buy top-up packs at a discount mid-contract, no surprise overages

Sizing for Virgin Active: exact per-resolution price depends on the journeys we scope together during the pilot. Baselining against ~13,000 monthly calls with the three Q4 journeys automated end-to-end. Elliot's £200k 2027 envelope covers a much wider scope than the pilot needs, so the Q4 number lands comfortably inside it.

Alex Holder

alex.holder@lorikeetcx.ai