BT 2016 Annual Report Download - page 20

22 BT Group plc
Annual Report 2016
Deliver superior customer service
Every day we touch the lives of millions, providing services that
help people get the most out of their working and personal lives.
Our customers’ experience is aected by the quality, reliability
and value of our products and services. And by how responsive
we are when we need to provide new services or sort out
problems. Their expectations continue to rise as our networks
play an increasingly important role in their lives and businesses.
Getting the customer experience right, and improving the quality
of our customer relationships, is at the heart of our strategy for
growth. And also supports our drive for cost transformation.
Customer experience is one of the measures we use to set our
executives’ annual bonus. It is made up of the Right First Time
(RFT) metric and a customer perception measure (see page 130).
RFT is our key internal measure of customer service. It tracks
how often we keep the promises we make to our customers.
How we did in the year
Our performance in the first quarter of the year was good.
But in the second, third and fourth quarters, our service was
impacted by electrical storms and system and network outages,
as well as 11 separate winter storms over a five‑month period.
The storms resulted in record levels of ooding and while we
received much praise for our response, they had a significant
impact on our service. We recovered well in the fourth quarter and
ended the year with a positive upturn in our service measures.
But we missed our RFT target for the year as a whole. Performance
was down 3.0% against a 4.7% increase in the prior year.
We need to redouble our eorts into next year as we know that
we need to do much better. We’re investing in jobs and we’re
multiskilling our people to give us better exibility and capacity.
In last year’s Annual Report we outlined a number of specific
areas that we would focus on this year. We’ve made good progress
against each of these, although we recognise that we need to
do more.
Acting on insight We’ve redesigned the way we launch new
products to more clearly reect customer
feedback and insight.
BT Mobile was our first product launch in
which customer experience was a specific
design criteria from the outset. Our net
promoter score is highest among consumers
taking BT Mobile.
We’re rolling out this approach to other
products under development.
Keeping our customers
connected
We’ve invested more to help make our
services more resilient. Our investment
in proactive network maintenance is up
by 22%, improving the fault profile of
our network.
Creating great tools
and systems
Our new ‘My BT’ app won a Digital
Experience Award, and has been downloaded
more than 435,000 times. 51% of users
check the app monthly and 21% use it
weekly. We’re updating it every quarter.
Recent developments include letting
customers pay their bills, monitor their
broadband usage, find out about network
issues, and view their orders and any faults.
In BT Wholesale we’ve invested significantly
in our online capabilities including: improved
search engines and navigation; personalised
online order and fault management; and
better online chat support.
Working better across
our organisation
We’ve invested in broadening our contact
centre agents’ skills and tools, letting
them take greater ownership of customer
issues and increasing the number of issues
addressed in a single call.
Where we’ve introduced this, in relation
to the provision of new connections,
complaints are 50% lower and customer
satisfaction is up more than 17%.
We’re extending this model across all our
contact centres.
Supporting our
people
We’re bringing our call centres back to the
UK, with 60% of BT Consumer customer calls
being answered within the UK by the end of
the year. And we’re planning to extend that
to 90% by the end of March 2017.
To do this we’ve hired more than 900 people
in the UK and plan to hire a further 1,000
over the course of the year ahead.
EE is creating 600 new roles to support its
plans to handle all customer service calls in
the UK and Ireland by the end of 2016.
Looking ahead, we’re focused on:
• investing further in our network, making it more resilient;
• reducing the number of appointments missed by our engineers;
• hiring more people into our contact centres;
• investing more in our contact centre advisers, giving them the
skills and tools to solve more customer issues; and
• improving our online tools to make it easier for customers
to serve themselves.
Key priorities