BT 2014 Annual Report Download - page 19

16 The Strategic Report
Purpose and strategy
Customer service delivery
We have improved our customer service this year, but not by as much as
we had wanted to. Right First Time (RFT) is our key metric for customer
service (see page 61). In practice, RFT means understanding what our
customers need, keeping our promises to them, keeping them informed,
and acting quickly to x things if they go wrong.
The RFT measure that we report for the year compares the average
for the fourth quarter with that for the year before. Our aim for the year
was to recover the 4% decline in RFT performance reported last year,
but we only achieved a 1.5% improvement.
Our service in the year was impacted by the widespread storms and
ooding across the U which led to record levels of faults and meant that
it took longer than normal to provide our services. In BT Global Services,
RFT did not increase by as much as planned partly as a result of a backlog
of orders. We also saw a signicant rise in demand following the launch
of BT Sport in August. This put pressure on our contact centre resources,
which aected the levels of service some customers received.
Our strategy begins with customer service delivery, so we are disappointed
with any setbacks in our quality of service, whatever the reason. We
received some bad press on customer service during the year and we did
let some customers down. We apologised where we had done so.
Customer expectations are changing. ouseholds are increasingly reliant
on their xed-lines for access to the internet. Their expectations around
service continuity and reliability have therefore risen. We have not always
kept pace with this change. And our processes have also not been good
enough. We are therefore making further investments in our systems,
our people and technology and in the resilience of our networks.
We want to deliver a step-change to provide a superior service to all our
customers. This year we have
• recruited hundreds of extra people into our contact centres
• invested in software to improve our performance in calling customers
back
• recruited around 1,400 additional engineers
• equipped our engineers with new diagnostic tools to help them locate
faults more quickly and
• removed process failures allowing us to hit more of our customer
appointments on time.
We also made progress on the focus areas we outlined in last years
Annual Report early life failures repeat visits and how we respond to
major service outages.
Going forward, we plan to
• invest proactively in our network to make it more resilient to bad
weather and reduce the number of faults that occur
• improve our online capabilities so our customers and people can track
what is happening more easily
• rebalance our resources so a higher proportion of customer calls are
answered from U call centres
• improve our ability to recover quickly for customers when things do go
wrong and
• change some of our key processes relating to installations and house
moves to deliver service more quickly and reliably.
<ou can read more about customer service delivery across
our lines of business from page 30
Cost transformation
We have continued to drive our cost transformation activities across
the group. This year, the benets of this to our bottom line have been
oset by our decision to invest in BT Sport. Our underlying operating
costs excluding transit were up 1%, but decreased 3% excluding
our investment of around £450m in BT Sport and a £64m non-cash
increase in the pensions operating charge. In aggregate, operating costs
and capital expenditure have reduced by around £5bn over the last
veyears.
We have continued to focus on end-to-end (e2e) processes which span
our lines of business. The creation of a central team to implement all
e2e and complex programmes has improved our ability to deliver them.
Specic e2e programmes included
• moving all of our access circuit data records onto a single database and
making sure the data is accurate. Across our global network we have
moved access circuits onto more cost-eective solutions and improved
the processes for circuit ceases and customer quotes
• replicating the forensic approach we used in our U businesses to
improve process eciency, reduce cost of failure and improve supplier
value-for-money in Continental Europe and
• identifying a number of improvements to the way we deliver Ethernet
services, reducing provision time and failures in the process.
During the year, we introduced the Continuous Improvement (CI)
initiative which we outlined in last years Annual Report. This gives
our people the tools for team-based problem solving to improve the
processes around them. 7,000 full-time employees have now been
through a CI wave, which is typically a 12-week programme. Initial
results have shown improvements in eciency, customer service and
employee engagement.
We continue to benchmark our cost structure against other large
telecoms operators. Our biennial review showed that while we have
moved closer to the top spot overall, there are still further opportunities
for improvement.
Our cost transformation plans for the coming year include more non-U
and e2e process reviews and further Continuous Improvement.
<ou can read about cost transformation within our
lines of business from page 30