BT mobilizes customer base

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. Some 38 percent of all calls into BT call centers are billing related. It is clearly not cost-effective to BT for a customer to call disputing a call charge of a few pounds when the call itself may cost more than that to handle.

BT carried out extensive research before launching its self-service initiative and discovered that customers actively wanted to be served online. Indeed, since its launch, this research has proved accurate, as the customer attrition rate is lower for those using online services.

Choosing a solution

BT already had a system in place that enabled online billing and allowed retail customers to view their itemized bill, but it wanted a more scalable, comprehensive self-service platform that offered greater functionality and convenience that would allow customers to manage all aspects of their accounts online 24 hours a day.

BT selected Oracle's Siebel Self-Service and eBilling solution because of superior out-of-the-box functionality and proven track record in similar leading organizations worldwide including AT&T, Sprint, Telstra and Verizon.

'Siebel Self-Service is the clear best-in-class, industry-leading application when it comes to e-billing. Its functionality is excellent - bill dispute capabilities are provided out of the box,' said Stephen Stokolos, Programme Director, Netcentricity Programme, BT.

Facing the future

Currently, BT has two million customers benefiting from BT's self-service and e-billing provision and the organization anticipates that by 2009 some seven million customers will have signed up.

'Once we achieve three million self-service customers we will start to see some significant cost reduction out of the call centers,' said Stokolos. 'In 2009 we expect $400 million reduction in call center cost.'

Although customers have clearly been delighted once they have made the transition to online services, BT is aware that many need additional encouragement and has assisted user adoption through a variety of incentives such as gift cards, prize draws and other online promotions. These marketing initiatives are not the only benefits that users will reap when switching to self-service.

Customers can manage and service their BT accounts on the Internet through an online dashboard and can also talk to customer service representatives online, simply by logging on to www.bt.com, but they will not have to wait on the phone to query a bill as the vast majority of issues can be handled by the embedded bill dispute capabilities online.

In addition, customers can select a variety of different ways to view their bills, not simply by number called but also by name, location or length of call time.

Aware that its potential customer base has a multitude of different needs, BT will continue to add richer and deeper online functionality for all its customers.

'Through Siebel Self-Service we have the capability to offer sophisticated e-billing capabilities to suit the size and complexity of any organization,' said Stokolos.

'To compete with our online-only competitors for a share of the 80 million UK consumer customer base, we need to offer compelling online capabilities. We believe that the Siebel Self-Service and eBilling is a key enabler and we will continue to develop our online services with this software.

'This year we will be adding the analytics component which will enable customers to analyze and understand their communication costs and usage by identifying trends and patterns across multiple views of their organisations.'