Ex-Virgin Media Director to Lead Zen Internet’s Retail Division
Rochdale-based broadband ISP Zen Internet has today announced the appointment of Georgina Lord to be the new Managing Director of their consumer facing Retail division, which forms part of the UK provider’s on-going efforts to take on the “big four” (BT, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk and Virgin Media).
Lord, who previously spent a decade at Virgin Media Business (i.e. holding various roles including Sales Director and Head of Department Enterprise North Field Sales etc.), joins Zen from her last role as Director of Sales, Marketing & Operations at Intercity Technology.
She will now be responsible for leading the company’s largest division, which has an annual turnover of £37m. As part of that she’ll be tasked with growing Zen’s existing residential and small business customer base “exponentially,” while continuing to deliver good customer service and reliability.
Paul Stobart, CEO of Zen Internet, said:
“Georgina joins Zen with a wealth of industry knowledge and experience, and we are delighted to have her on board as our MD of Retail.
We have big ambitions and believe that with Georgina’s leadership style backed by our robust business strategy and investment plans that we have the catalysts in place to really accelerate our plans and deliver a service wrap that is unique in our industry – putting our customer at the heart of everything we do.
We’ve no doubt Georgina will fit right in with our people-first culture here at Zen and look forward to taking on the big players in our industry as we move towards 2020 and beyond.”
End.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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Either the next big exciting step for Zen, allowing them to rapidly grow whilst staying honest and real as they have been…
Or day 0 of the death of Zen as they lose everything they have been in the race to become one of the other big players by taking on a VM style method of growth/service.
GAH…. Not the news I wanted as a new customer. Zen could do with avoiding emulating Virgin media, certainly in terms of customer service.
Oh dear
hmmm… Zen, you’ve been superb since I joined you a few years ago, don’t go downhill now, but I suspect you will as you grow and the Virgin customer service approach takes hold. Time will tell.
The sheer inference that one new person joining a company that built their entire reputation on the quality of the service above all would influence their entire service model purely because they happened to work at a provider in the past that people have issues with is laughable. Especially considering according to the above they primarily held sales based roles at Virgin, not service!
Talk about knee jerk!
@alphabetsoup well said!
Agreed maybe she left VM after a decade because she had enough of how things were done there. Some commentators just like to induce panic.
On the one hand I agree with the sentiment of your statement. It’s unlikely, though not impossible, that one person isn’t going to shift anything in terms of good work, standards etc. It’s possible though as if the person is in a senior and influential enough role, which is the case here, they CAN affect sweeping change.
The other hand is this. Individuals who take up a key position in organisations like this, who warrant news outside of the company, get introduced through their achievements and previously held positions. If none of that meant anything whatsoever and it was just a name and someone filling a role, then what of that justifies any fanfare? Why do the public – us – need to know? It’s because corporate name dropping “we’ve got this person from well known X place, look at us” means something to someone.
These people can affect large changes and I agree with those responding that lessons learnt at VM aren’t what customers want at Zen.
Some people, myself included, are just cynical. But this industry has done nothing whatsoever to engender itself with mindshare deserving of anything else. In my opinion anyway. Companies like Zen are the exception and not the rule and it would be such a shame for their growth to result in eschewment of their values. History proves this happens. Concern is warranted.
How do you that the person concerned did not try to improve things at VM when she was there but was ignored?
The impression that a company is bad so everyone in it or from it must be bad is ridiculous.