BT 2016 Annual Report Download - page 59

Overview The Strategic Report Governance Financial statements Additional information
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Transform our costs
We’ve continued to reduce our costs with underlying
operating costs excluding transit down 1%.
We’re taking tried-and-tested methods from the UK and are using
them overseas to reduce the cost of failure, improve efficiency,
streamline organisational structure and get better value for money
from suppliers.
Reduce failures in our processes
We continue to deliver good results by improving how we manage
access circuits around the world including:
• removing circuits we no longer need;
• migrating to more advanced technologies with lower unit costs;
and
• reducing order backlogs.
Improving third-party supplier value for money
We’ve saved money on customer premises equipment by:
• applying best practice on managing discounts and rebates
from a large supplier;
• using refurbished kit;
• disposing of unused equipment; and
• insourcing the maintenance of equipment where we have
the skills to do this ourselves.
From these, and other, cost transformation programmes, we have
not only delivered significant benefits this year but have
also identified further opportunities for next year.
Invest for growth
We’ve continued to strengthen our capabilities with
the launch of new cloud-based services which can be
integrated with dierent suppliers and are available
globally.
High-growth regions
We’ve improved our cloud-based BT Connect services in
Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. And we also launched our
BT MeetMe with Dolby Voice conferencing services in Argentina,
Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.
Our network
We continued to expand our network; we’ve extended our
internet capability including 18 new internet gateways and
a three-fold increase to nearly 100 internet global points
of presence (PoPs). And we opened two new, highly secure,
sustainable data centres in the UK.
We also introduced cloud-based acceleration and security
services, marking our first steps on our virtualised network
services roadmap.
Deliver superior customer service
Customer experience is at the heart of the way we do
business. We gather feedback from our customers through
our global account management teams and by using
third-party surveys.
And this year we extended the rollout of our ‘Customer
Thermometer’ to more customers. It takes a regular gauge
of customer experience using email to gain customer feedback
at key points of interaction.
During the year we:
• improved the speed of service delivery for our main products
by 14%. This will remain a key focus for us next year;
• continued to deliver network reliability across our core products;
• introduced pre-emptive, automated service management into
our key networks. This means we can identify issues and act on
them before the customer feels any impact; and
• started to develop better tools to keep our customers informed
of progress on major orders.
Thanks to these improvements, we increased our Right First Time
measure 2.3%, building on last year’s 8.6% increase.
However, we did see a decline in overall customer satisfaction
in our loyalty survey. This was largely driven by issues around
service delivery, in particular delays in providing Ethernet circuits
in the UK. We’re addressing this by changing our processes and
procedures.
We’re currently piloting a Net Promoter Score (NPS) and will launch
this globally next year. This new measure of customer satisfaction
will give us much more timely and actionable insight on a
customer-by-customer basis.