BT mobilizes customer base (page 1 of 2)

Whilst pricing is a key motivator for customers, BT is aware that this is not the only driver so it has adopted Oracle's Siebel Self-Service and eBilling applications that will provide a customer self-service platform.

This will give BT the ability to offer superior customer service levels and reduce costs and thereby pass on cost savings to customers.

The story of great success

BT (British Telecommunications plc) is one of the world's leading providers of communications solutions serving customers in Europe, the Americas and Asia Pacific. Principal activities include networked IT services, local, national and international telecommunications services and higher-value broadband and Internet products and services.

In the UK, BT serves over 20 million business and residential customers with more than 30 million fixed voice lines and also provides network services to other operators. BT sees customer relationships as key to ongoing success.

With each customer contact, BT aims to deliver an excellent experience. With increasing competition in the telecommunications industry allowing customers to switch supplier easily, BT is aware that it must do everything it can to ensure complete customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The challenge of new competition

Although a long-established telecommunications supplier with a huge customer base, BT, along with other telecommunication providers, is now facing stiff competition from new operators that are able to offer cheap pricing options as a result of their lack of overhead. BT's call centers cost the organization approximately $1 billion each year.

To address this challenge and achieve the overarching goal of delivering the highest levels of customer satisfaction, BT carried out a detailed analysis, mapping transformation areas against impact on customer satisfaction and reduced costs.

This enabled the company to prioritise key change requirements and understand their impact on these two objectives. The strategy was then divided into two key stages - transformation impacting customer satisfaction and transformation impacting cost of delivery.

Through this analysis, BT was able to identify that it was of key importance to have their issue dealt with at first contact - this led to the creation of the main transformation program - 'First Contact Resolution'. This simply set out to ensure that most inbound contact into the organisation (via whichever channel the customer chooses) can be dealt with by the first transaction.

This was achieved by a combination of process changes and people training which - when underpinned by smart technology including CRM software, intelligence call routing and knowledge management - helped agents understand who was calling and why, along with additional information relevant to that call.

This strategy realized a 'triple whammy' of benefits impacting the business, customer and agent and, most dramatically, led to a significant reduction in the number of repeat and transferred calls. This delivered:

• enhanced customer satisfaction as customers were not having to call back or wait whilst being shunted around various parts of BT.

• reduced costs by freeing agents to deal with new calls and only requiring on average one agent to deal with each customer.

• increased satisfaction levels amongst agents as they had the power to deal with calls effectively.

• reduced agent churn, which is important to BT because only by retaining good agents can BT grow its business.

• raised management satisfaction levels as business goals are met in terms of cost benefit and retention.

An intrinsic part of this strategy was BT's investment in a Customer Self-Service and eBilling system, BT Together Online.