BT 2013 Annual Report Download - page 15

13
Strategy
Strategy 13
Our strategy
A better
future
A better
business
Customer
service delivery Cost transformation Investing for the future
Driving broadband-based consumer services
Being the ‘Brand for Business’ for UK SMEs
BT Global Services – a global leader
The wholesaler of choice
The best network provider
A responsible and sustainable business leader
We are a leading communications services provider. In the UK, we
sell products and services to consumers and small and medium-sized
enterprises (SMEs). Around the world, as well as in the UK, we provide
managed networked IT services for large multinational corporations,
domestic businesses and national and local government organisations.
We also sell wholesale telecoms services to communications providers
(CPs) in the UK and internationally.
Our strategy is built on Customer service delivery, Cost transformation
and Investing for the future.
These are the foundations for making BT a better business. They build
on one another. The better we serve our customers, the less time and
money we need to spend fixing faults and the things that go wrong. The
more we save through transforming our costs, the more we can invest in
giving customers what they need now and in the future. By investing in
the six strategic priorities shown above we aim to grow the value of our
business.
Customer service delivery
We constantly try to improve the service we provide to our customers.
In practice that means understanding what they need, making it easy
for them to deal with us, keeping our promises, keeping them informed,
and acting quickly to fix things if they go wrong.
‘Right First Time’ (RFT) is our key metric for customer service (see
page22). It is simply about getting it right for the customer, first time.
RFT improved each year from 2006/07 to 2011/12 and we made
further progress in the first quarter of this financial year. But record
rainfall then led to flooding across the UK, causing a higher number
of faults in the network. To make sure we fixed these faults as quickly
as possible, we had to transfer resources away from provisioning new
orders. As a result, customers had to wait longer for those orders, we
had more calls from customers than we forecast and it took us longer
than normal to answer those calls. We did, however, hire extra engineers
to help with repair work and new orders (see page 60) and by February
2013 we had managed to get provision lead times back to the levels we
have committed to.
Overall, we did not improve our service as we aimed to this year, and our
RFT measure declined by 4%. While we did not achieve our group RFT
target, BT Global Services achieved its target helped by an increase in
the number of major contract milestones delivered on time and fewer
reported customer incidents.
Copper cable theft remains a problem. This year we have worked more
closely with the police and government to tackle it. We have set up a
nationwide cable alarming system and taken other measures such as
forensically marking our cables. Because of this work, we have had
28% fewer customer faults due to cable theft this year, and 50% fewer
attacks on our network. A new Scrap Metal Dealers Act should clamp
down further on the illegal trade in stolen metal when it comes into
effect later this year.
We are improving processes across the business to make sure we keep
appointment slots, repair faults more quickly and fulfil new orders faster.
We are also working to improve how we interact with our customers
through the use of better quality contact information, customer portals
and self-service channels that give customers more ways to resolve their
problems quickly. We have successfully piloted new voice recognition
capabilities to make it easier for customers to get the right help when
calling us. We are now rolling this service out more widely.
Improved BT Home Hub diagnostics for our TV and broadband
services will locate and resolve faults more quickly with fewer calls and
engineering visits. We will also create an integrated customer experience
across our consumer channels – voice, social media, email, chat forums
and videos.
We encourage our customers to provide us with feedback so that we
can serve them better. We believe that the changes we are making
will deliver a better customer experience and lead to further cost
transformation benefits.
You can read more about customer service delivery across
our lines of business in the Performance section on page 53
Cost transformation
We achieved further efficiency savings across our business. We have
cut waste, applied best practice and freed up resources to invest in our
future. More and more, we have focused on end-to-end processes that
span our whole business. We also started the next phase of our group-
wide restructuring programme which will generate further savings and
improve customer service.
Specific activities during the year included:
— reviewing our entire stock and supply chain. This has given us better
controls over our stock as well as improving how we distribute and
store it
— improving our process for fixing faults for BT Global Services and BT
Wholesale customers. We have upgraded our systems, migrated work
to four strategic service centres and made it easier for different teams
to work together
— rationalising our network and IT infrastructure. For example, we
closed a major legacy network which served the financial services
sector and migrated those customers onto our global MPLS
platform, giving them improved service and reliability. We have
also put programmes in place to rationalise our legacy UK backhaul
andglobal IP networks
— combining BT Innovate & Design and BT Operate into our new
BTTechnology, Service & Operations unit (BT TSO)
— improving product and software development across all lines
ofbusiness through better prioritisation, quality and automation
oftesting
Our aim is to drive shareholder value by making BT a better business with a
better future. This year we made further progress towards this goal, and the
investments we are making position us well for the future. Our strategy is
delivering results.