BT 2013 Annual Report Download - page 59

Performance 57
Performance
BT Enterprises
For BT Conferencing, the US market has been particularly tough, but our
expansion into Latin America and Asia Pacific has gone well. We have
achieved major wins in all regions, including Reckitt Benckiser, Message
Stick and a major international bank. We have signed a partnership with
Dolby to develop new services using innovative technology that makes
audio conference calls feel more like face-to-face meetings.
In June 2012 we combined all our wi-fi activities into one identity:
BT Wi-fi. We have won a number of major deals, including contracts
with Barclays bank and Game (a videogames retailer) for in-branch and
in-store wi-fi. Wi-fi minutes trebled for the year and reached 4.7bn
minutes in the fourth quarter and over 13bn minutes for the year.
BT Redcare grew its ATM machines communications business by 50%,
thanks to a contract with a major bank for 4,300 sites. We have invested
in new fibre sensing technology, expanded our Fire and Security
business in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and launched
broadband-based public CCTV.
The ‘Adopt a Kiosk’ programme in BT Payphones has helped us save
on removal costs, as well as letting local communities use their much-
loved red kiosk in a number of different ways.
In BT Expedite & Fresca, we have finished rolling out self-checkouts for
WH Smith and a cloud-based store solution for Fat Face. We have also
won an e-commerce contract with Claire’s, a new customer.
We are building a pipeline of propositions to integrate BT Tikit’s
capabilities with our core portfolio.
Customer service delivery
The year started well with a good performance on customer service
delivery in the first quarter. But this was followed by some of the
wettest weather on record in the UK which affected our lead times
onprovisioning and repairs for much of the year.
We have invested in making things simpler for our customers. For
example, streamlining our processes to save them time and cut down
the number of times they need to deal with us. Our ‘Net Easy’ score
(which tracks how easy it is for customers to get issues fixed), has
increased by two percentage points.
We are helping customers to help themselves more – through improved
capabilities on bt.com, a desktop help app and our automated self-help
functions when they call us. We now handle 75% of all service contact
over self-service channels.
Customer service in BT Business has improved further. Complaints are
down 24%. We have achieved this by fixing things before customers get
in touch and by focusing on getting things right first time.
We have also managed to cut cancelled orders by 35% and unnecessary
visits to customers by 16,000.
The 75th anniversary of the 999 service has helped to showcase our
long history of managing high-volume call centres. Of the 31m 999
calls received by BT operators each year, 98% are answered within five
seconds.
Cost transformation
We made good progress on reducing our costs, benefiting from our
actions last year, and from new ones this year.
Net operating costs decreased by 5% (2011/12: 6%) reflecting
our costtransformation initiatives, partly offset by additional costs
associated with the improved revenue trend, and our investment in
BTSport.
We have generated savings in each of our main divisions from these
initiatives. We have redesigned processes to reduce labour and failure
costs. We have renegotiated supplier contracts. We have also reduced
the levels of baddebt.
Investing for the future
BT Retail’s biggest investments this year have been in TV.
We will launch our BT Sport channels in summer 2013. These will offer
premium content at great value. In football, we have secured the
broadcast rights to 38 live games in the Premier League – plus Italy’s
Serie A, Ligue 1 in France, MLS in the US and Brasileiro in Brazil. We have
won rights for Premiership rugby, the Women’s Tennis Association and
Moto GP.
We have agreed to buy ESPN’s UK and Ireland TV channels business
(including the ESPN and ESPN America channels), with rights to the
FA Cup, UEFA Europa League, Scottish Premier League and other
livesports.
We have hired some of the UK’s top sports presenters – Jake Humphrey,
Clare Balding, Lawrence Dallaglio and Rio Ferdinand – and we have
secured our own prime production space in the former Olympic Park.
In the business market we have invested in building our conferencing
service overseas, specialist IT services (like BT Tikit) and cloud services.
The 2.6GHz spectrum licence we acquired will enable us to provide
businesses and consumers with enhanced 4G mobile broadband
services, building on our existing strength in wi-fi.