BT 2011 Annual Report Download - page 13

10
BUSINESS REVIEW
OUR BUSINESS AND STRATEGY
Who we are
BT is one of the world’s leading communications services
companies, serving the needs of customers in the UK and in more
than 170 countries worldwide.
What we do
Our main activities are the provision of fixed telephony lines and
calls, broadband, mobile and TV products and services as well as
networked IT services.
In the UK we are a leading communications services provider. We
sell products and services to consumers, small and medium-sized
enterprises (SMEs) and the public sector. We also sell wholesale
products and services to communications providers (CPs) in the UK
and around the world. Globally, we supply managed networked
IT services to multinational corporations, domestic businesses
and national and local government organisations.
Our aim
Our aim is to drive shareholder value by making BT a better
business with a better future. Last year we set out a three-year
plan to achieve this aim. Our strategy focuses on three key areas –
customer service delivery, cost transformation and investing for the
future. These three areas are the building blocks for making BT a
better business. The better we serve our customers, the less time
and money we spend on fixing faults and by transforming our costs
we create new opportunities for investment in our future. By
investing in our strategic priorities we expect to deliver growth
in 2013.
Customer service delivery
Our strategy starts with customer service and we continually work
to improve the level of customer experience. In practice this means
keeping our promises, being easy to contact and straightforward
to deal with; it means keeping our customers informed and taking
prompt action to put things right if they have cause to complain;
above all it means trying to do things ‘right first time’.
‘Right first time’ is our key measure for customer service. It
measures how often we get things right the first time for our
customers: this is important as failure increases our costs. In 2011
we achieved a 3% improvement in this measure which compares
with a 10.5% improvement in 2010. This shows that we made
further progress this year but the scale was less than in previous
years due to a number of issues, particularly a large increase in
provision volumes requiring engineer visits. These were up over
25% in the year. In addition, the very poor winter weather both
increased repair demand and reduced our ability to deploy
engineers effectively. In order to meet these challenges we
recruited additional engineers and have now brought repair work
in hand to the equivalent of a day and a half’s work. Provision lead
times improved to an average of 10 days at the end of March 2011.
We will learn from what went wrong and will work more closely
with our CP customers to ensure that together we provide better
volume forecasts and we have a more flexible resource that can
meet peaks of demand more effectively.
We did make progress in a number of other areas. Call handling
times for consumer sales improved by 19 seconds due to the
introduction of Agent.com, a new system that allows our sales
agents to process orders faster and more effectively. With the roll-
out of a desktop help system, broadband consumer customers can
now solve many problems without the need to call our service
centres. Within BT Retail, our ‘one contact resolution’ aims to deal
with customer queries in one call. We saw the number of queries
dealt with in one contact increase by 15% in BT Consumer and
•Who we are
•What we do
•Our aim
•Our strategic priorities
•How we measure our progress
No. 1
Provider of fixed telephony lines
in the UK
3%
Improvement in customer
service delivery measure
£1.1bn
Operating costasavings
£2.5bn
Potential investment in
super-fast broadband network
Progress made against all our
strategic priorities
This is the BT Annual Report for the year ended 31 March 2011. It complies with UK regulations
and comprises part of the Annual Report on Form 20-F for the US Securities and Exchange
Commission to meet US regulations. This Annual Report has been sent to shareholde rs who have
elected to receive a copy. A separate summary financial statement & notice of meeting 2011 has
been issued to shareholders who have elected to receive a shorter document. Both documents
are available on the company’s website, www.bt.com.
In this Annual Report, references to ‘BT Group’, ‘BT’, ‘the group’, ‘the company’, ‘we’ or ‘our’ are
to BT Group plc (which includes the activities of British Telecommunications plc) and its
subsidiaries and lines of business, internal service units, or any of them as the context may
require.
References to ‘a year’ are to the financial year ended 31 March of that year, e.g. ‘2011’ refers to
the year ended 31 March 2011, except in relation to our super-fast fibre-based broadband
roll-out plans, which are based on calendar years, not financial years. Unless otherwise stated, all
non financial statistics are at 31 March 2011 except BT Infinity customer numbers which are at
6 May 2011.
Please see cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements on page 162.
Denotes corporate responsibility activities. Being a responsible and sustainable business is
integral to the way we work. Our non financial key performance indicators measure our progress.
These also include direct costs to BT related to our environmental and social performance, in line
with the principles of the connected reporting framework.
aBefore specific items, depreciation and amortisation. See page 48 for details.
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