Virgin Media O2 dials in digital content while saving multimillions /year
- Headquarters: London, United Kingdom
- Technology Stack: Angular, Next.js, LangChain, Braze, React
- Multi-million pound annual savings
- 31% operator share in the UK
- 24-hour site rebuild and production
A connected vision: The start of a digital transformation
We all know the anticipation of a phone ring or message ping, with that moment of connection powered by telecommunications providers like Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) (opens in a new window). Yet behind those simple, everyday moments lies a complex digital infrastructure, and after the merger of Virgin Media and O2 in 2021, the newly unified company embarked on a journey to modernize its digital operations.
At VMO2, legacy content management systems were creating friction, silos, and high costs. Content was spread across platforms, updates were slow, and new pages required precious developer time. Virgin Media O2 needed a future-ready CMS to unify its ecosystem, reduce costs, and empower teams. The solution? Storyblok.
Storyblok enabled us to achieve a multi-million-pound annual saving, streamlining and centralizing multiple platforms and use cases into one.
Laying the foundation: Centralization, reduced TCO & speed
Switching to Storyblok triggered a domino effect of innovation across the VMO2 organization with pioneering websites and progressive web applications (PWAs), including:
Significant Cost Savings: TCOs & Opex Savings
By consolidating platforms into Storyblok, Virgin Media O2 was able to eliminate multiple six-figure overheads. These included expensive legal page updates, sitemap builds, and ongoing fees from other CMS tools. Storyblok allowed the internal team to build what previously required outside help, sometimes in just 48 hours.
Faster Content Ops and Flexibility
Editors gained autonomy with real-time updates via Storyblok’s Visual Editor. Legal content, SIM installation guides, and support materials became reusable blocks, drastically reducing the time spent on content creation. This is essential to operations, with over 40,000 pieces of content to manage and growing daily.
Storyblok’s headless architecture further allowed Virgin Media O2 to create reusable content blocks. The merger between Virgin Media and O2 meant the roll-out of services and systems soon after were beneficial for managing content that had to be consistent across the brands, improving operational efficiency in the long run.
Flexible MACH architecture for an enhanced user experience:
Virgin Media O2 leveraged key features such as:
- Storyblok API: The power of connection has rung in new innovative use cases of integrating via API internal tools, ChatGPT, streamlining content migrations, and dialing in omnichannel use cases. Storyblok API-first and cloud-based architecture supports last-minute events.
- Role-based Access Controls (RBAC) with SSO: Virgin Media O2 can govern who can access and edit specific content pieces. An SSO integration managed internally via Okta helps filter which users, based on their permissions, can make edits, access, and move along the workflow.
- Workflows: Storyblok’s workflows help ensure specific parameters are respected by pushing the page to approval before its release. If something goes wrong and the wrong colored buttons, for example, are added to a page, the history application within the Visual Editor comes into play. Storyblok allows anything to be rolled back within three minutes!
- Dimensions & Data sources: Flexibility in creating custom plugins and components allows the Virgin Media O2 team to go to market quickly according to brand. For example, a custom plugin component like an icon picker was created to manage over 56,000 icons using Storyblok’s Data sources and Dimensions app. This has enabled editors to update content with minimal technical support and an increased turnaround time.
- Visual Editor: Content editors can see their changes in real time, reducing the time needed to publish new content.
- Reusable components made for marketers, designers, and developers: From a design perspective, the reusability of components is rooted in a headless component library based on brand-agnostic themes generated in Figma. The team can compile headless design system tokens into CSS to power the component library. Building a landing page or campaign is straightforward for content editors, providing the capability for components to appear red on the Virgin Media side and blue on the O2 side. Storyblok selects the theme accordingly and pushes all block component updates in line with the theme.
Adopting a MACH approach was essential to Virgin Media O2's achieving the adaptability and scalability they needed. The element of technical flexibility also enabled the team to continuously experiment and innovate with the technologies at hand toward best-of-need new use cases across the organization.
Previously, adding new pages meant small code changes (having to tell the previous site builder what pages to build), but now we don’t have to, and the pages simply go live, removing an entire process that took 20 minutes per page.
Transmitting innovation across Virgin Media O2’s multiple use cases
Knowledge Hub
The first significant migration involved moving from Virgin Media’s eGain instance to Storyblok, as a centralized knowledge hub for customer service agents. Previously built on Angular with eGain, the hub moved to Next.js and Storyblok. This led to:
- Improved performance
- Streamlined workflows for agents
- Enhanced search for rapid case resolution
It took six weeks for a team of three engineers to build our Assisted Sales platform, enabling all of our agents to sell. Agents enter various upstream systems like Salesforce which will hand them over, and they're able to provision. Prior to this transformation, every order an agent took was manually provisioned in the back of this. Now it's fully automated end-to-end.
VOLT
As the leading UK telecommunications company, Virgin Media O2 is at the heart of mobile phone communications and broadband internet with around 45 million connections. As the joint venture's flagship homepage, virginmediao2.co.uk (opens in a new window) serves as the central hub for customers to access company information and be directed to other brands as needed.
As Virgin Media O2 continues its journey of convergence, this hub (VOLT) will form the foundation of a brand experience, combining the services of Virgin Media broadband and O2 mobile into a single offering. Built in under one week, with the powerful collaboration of one engineer, one QA and one content editor.
Virgin Media Webpages
Historically, sales have always been challenging for Virgin Media O2 (opens in a new window), with content teams rushing to make changes for seasonal trading events, such as Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and New Year, all falling within a single quarter.
In March 2025, the Online Sales platform launched its initial migration using Storyblok, creating complex websites, managing each trading event individually, and scheduling releases. Virgin Media migrated over 800 pages from Strapi into Storyblok. Thanks to Storyblok’s API's efficiency, the content was moved in just four days—two days of engineering a migration script and two days of developing a replacement Virgin Media UI.
Powered by Storyblok, Content editors can see what they’re creating in real-time, allowing them to build richer, higher-quality content.
O2 Modern Static Webpages
O2’s migration from LifeRay and Drupal involved over 1,500+ pages of homepages, help, accessibility, legal, and regulatory pages, as well as the International Hub (opens in a new window). Thanks to the efficiency of Storyblok’s API, the content was moved in just four days — two days of engineering a migration script and two days to develop a replacement Virgin Media UI, reducing operational burden and legacy CMS complexity.
Following the migration, O2 achieved:
- #1 UK and #2 EU supplier position for Samsung Galaxy S25
- Record-breaking pre-order performance in just 2 weeks
Storyblok's CMS contributed to our highest-ever S Series (Samsung) pre-order performance over a fortnight with the No.1 UK operator.
Connecting the Storyblok API with OpenAI’s ChatGPT for migration
During the o2.co.uk webpage migration, Virgin Media O2 faced the challenge of ensuring fast migration and data accuracy. The idea then was to replicate the migration process for content on the O2 side. The team realized that most of the odd-thousand or so pages were static. By integrating OpenAI ChatGPT capabilities with the Storyblok APIs and their Storyblok-powered site, they could automate the role of Content QA and output it into JIRA to streamline the QA and release process.
The team built a bot that went through the live site to capture content and migrate that into Storyblok—moving the script from HTML to markdown natively. To QA over a thousand pages, saving costs and time, the team used an open-source library called LangChain, where they could show the content from Storyblok. From there, they could pull that site in and add live content to use Open AI’s ChatGPT through LangChain to do the QA. Each page was then put into JIRA, and the bot from JIRA was powered to supplement the QA work.
O2 Priority
The O2 Priority website and app on iOS and Android manage promotions and ticket sales, crucial in driving not just revenue, but also brand loyalty. As one of the organization's vital traffic-heavy sites, it was essential for the team to host O2 Priority in its own space to ensure the next reiteration could withstand such a surge.
Built with React Native and Next.js, the team has created an integration to manage an external O2 Priority product and stock natively in Storyblok, ensuring that the Priority Team can manage the end-to-end platform in a single place. With a secret menu inside the live app, the author can scan a QR code on their phone. The live app then becomes the editing environment, where they can see their releases in real-time updates on their phone.
Virgin Media’s MyVM App: Built with React Native, Braze, and Storyblok
Virgin Media’s new application, MyVM (opens in a new window), on iOS and Android, is a digital tool for managing household services and was developed using React Native, Braze as a decision engine, and integrated with Storyblok. The application was coded in 2 weeks, with 3 to 4 content editors migrating hundreds of pages, to service and support high-traffic interactions of 1 million page views a month, 250,000 customers, and an average engagement of 38 seconds per page.
Our main achievement comes from the MyVM app, where we fully migrated over to Storyblok as part of the overarching project to move a suite of apps into Storyblok. The overall experience was very seamless.
O2 Sales
Following the success of the O2 Sales (opens in a new window) static content migration, Virgin Media O2 has started building its innovative new eCommerce sales platform, housing a marketing catalog for nearly 10,000 device variants in Storyblok. During the migration, the team was able to cede and maintain the catalogs based on exports from previous systems, with over 3,000 products imported in under an hour.
For the first time, Virgin Media O2 now has a single source of truth for how to present a given device, its capabilities, specifications, and precise vendor-provided marketing content.
Information for these devices comes from various systems. This is then used to power Elastic Search, enabling O2 content editors a level of flexibility that was previously unknown. By building a Storyblok App integration, Virgin Media O2 also allows its trading teams to import these data sources, ensuring accuracy and efficiency.
Having a single source of truth for marketing information for devices and tariffs in this use case has served not only online sales but also offline sales (in-store and customer contact center) and Customer Care teams.
Assisted Offline Sales
Stakeholders on the O2 side were taking notice of the digital transformation. As migration continued on the Virgin Media side, the team brought in one of their internal tools, Nexus, for their field agents.
Over 4,000 Agents across contact centers, 3200+ retail stores, shopping centers, and global contact centers now use the Assisted Sales platform (Nexus) with Storyblok handling the front end. This application lets agents serve customers all the way from the services they can receive at their postcode, the ability to select bundles and offers, and going through the process of completing the order in real time while automatically rendering personalized landing pages via Storyblok blocks.
Nexus lets agents check service availability, place customer orders in real-time, and automatically render personalized landing pages via Storyblok blocks. Agent Nexus works on a tablet with a SIM card installed, allowing agents to seamlessly submit an order from anywhere: someone's home, a shopping center, an O2 store, the Virgin Media stand, or a call center. Storyblok's component blocks act as an API receptor for information to exist and process on a landing page or PWA. This means that agents access Salesforce on their tablet, create a lead, and place a customer’s name and address into the system for an order handed over to the app.
This automation replaced manual workflows and dramatically scaled agent productivity, significantly improving customer experience and sales conversion.
QR Code Sustainability
Born through an internal hackathon, the team developed a custom field implementation for Storyblok's QR generation as part of a sustainability-focused innovation to replace several printed hardware quick-start guides.
One team started working on building out simple online quick-start journeys, whilst another approached the challenge of the QR code. They developed a novel solution allowing users to create a short-code-based redirect within the Storyblok UI and instantly present it with a downloadable QR code. The idea is that a user can come into the site or app, and the redirect will send them to a form, where the user can download an SVG file of a QR code natively within Storyblok to print—essentially redirecting QR codes in one.
This also doubled to allow the generation of vanity links used across the virginmedia.com and o2.co.uk online platforms. Storyblok’s features have improved data quality to power more sophisticated tools for VMO2’s teams, creating optimized content and shaving off 2,000 lines of unused code into a QR code. Thousands of redirects were previously hosted through Adobe Experience Manager.
Connecting forwards with Storyblok
Storyblok has helped VMO2 unify its content strategy, reduce operational costs, and empower teams across departments. With each migration and integration, the team unlocks new use cases, demonstrating that Storyblok isn’t just a CMS — it’s the foundation for VMO2’s agile, omnichannel future.
The journey is ongoing, but the connection is already clear: Virgin Media O2 and Storyblok are dialing in the future of digital content, one block at a time.
