BT 2009 Annual Report Download - page 6

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FINANCIAL STATEMENTS REPORT OF THE DIRECTORS BUSINESS AND FINANCIAL REVIEWS OVERVIEW
4BT GROUP PLC ANNUAL REPORT & FORM 20-F
OVERVIEW
CHIEF EXECUTIVE’S STATEMENT
There’s no doubt about it, this has been a tough year. A tough year
for BT Group, a tough year for the economy and a tough year for
our shareholders.
But there are good reasons to look forward with optimism. Taken
together, BT Retail, BT Wholesale and Openreach have delivered a
resilient performance. That despite the economic downturn.
However this success was overshadowed by the performance at
BT Global Services. Because of this we have had to take a number
of very substantial charges. These have not been comfortable, but
were necessary to establish the solid foundations from which we
can now build a profitable business.
Meeting our customers’ needs
The markets in which we operate are changing fast and we need
to move with them. In the UK we have the most competitive
communications market in the world. Thanks largely to BT’s
investment, the UK now has some of the highest broadband
availability and take up in the world as well as some of the lowest
prices. Speeds are improving all the time, and our new fibre based
services will deliver a next generation of super-fast broadband,
bringing speeds of up to 100Mb to people’s homes.
We have made real improvements in customer service, and we
are going to do much more. Let me give you a couple of examples.
Three years ago you could expect a fault on your telephone line
once every nine years. That’s now improved to once every 13 years.
By the end of the financial year, 97% of our customers were getting
through on their first call, complaints were down and customer
satisfaction had improved significantly. And on Christmas Day 2008
we recorded our lowest ever number of outstanding network faults.
When our service improves, our customers are happy, more
people want to do business with us, and also we can reduce our
costs. That’s because when we get our services right first time, the
number of people phoning our call centres falls and the number of
engineers we need to send out to fix things declines. That’s just as
true for the biggest customer of BT Global Services or BT Wholesale
as it is for a family buying a broadband service from us. We have
made significant progress, but this is most definitely not the end of
our journey to make BT a leader in customer service.
New opportunities
Even in the most difficult economic circumstances a diverse and
agile business will find opportunities to grow and improve the
service it delivers to its customers. A really good example is BT
Conferencing which is strongly growing both revenues and profits
and is now the world’s biggest provider of videoconferencing.
Using the latest technology we are meeting the needs of companies
all around the world. Helping customers save money by cutting
travel costs and reducing their carbon footprint.
Another example is our Business One Plan service, which is the
UK’s first triple play of landline, mobile and broadband for small
and medium-sized businesses. It launched three years ago and in
2009 added free calls within an organisation – even between
Ian Livingston
Chief Executive
Ian Livingston
Chief Executive
13 May 2009
The actions we have taken will enable BT
to come out of this recession a stronger
and better business.
offices and mobile workers – a significant saving. Over a million
business lines are now using this service and more than 2,500 new
customers sign up each week. In our consumer business the new BT
Home Hub has been ordered by over 800,000 customers since its
launch last June. It has the best wireless range on offer, and allows
customers to save power by programming it to switch off when it’s
not being used.
These are just a few examples of BT seizing opportunities and
delivering great service in the UK and around the globe. I was
particularly pleased that Telemark Services, an industry analyst, has
just rated BT Global Services the best operator in the world in its
Customer Satisfaction Index with the highest score ever awarded.
A better business, a better future
In order to transform the company, we need to drive significant cost
saving. Regretfully this has meant a reduction in our workforce.
However, we have sought to retrain and redeploy permanent staff
whenever we can. That has meant that in the past year only a third
of the reduction came from our permanent staff, with the rest made
up of contractors and third-party resource.
So in the past year we have taken some tough decisions and we
have taken some bold decisions too. Like investing £1.5bn in fibre
based super-fast broadband. There are certainly plenty of
challenges, but I believe that the actions we have taken will enable
BT to come out of this recession a stronger and better business.
OVERVIEW