BT 2016 Annual Report Download - page 65

Overview The Strategic Report Governance Financial statements Additional information
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Deliver superior customer service
Our vision is to be the market leader for customer service
within three years. But with our Right First Time measure
down 5.9% (2014/15: up 5.1%), we know we need to
do better.
Our customer service measure has been significantly impacted this
year by the wet winter weather which caused delays in speed of
response for repairs. To mitigate this type of impact, we’ll continue
to invest and make changes until we can provide a consistently
better experience. We’ve already seen signs we’re on the right
track.
We measure feedback directly from our customers and via our
net promoter score, which has increased by 2%. Our people’s
hard work has meant that we’ve seen an 8% decrease in
complaints since last year. We’ve also improved our ability to
resolve issues to the customer’s satisfaction at first point of
contact, and this measure has increased 4%.
During the year we:
• increased the number of customers on our ‘UK Business Solution’
system to 93% of the total. This platform brings all the core
products and services that we sell in large volumes onto a single
system, making it easier to serve customers who buy multiple
products from us. It gives us a single view of the customer’s
account, providing all the right information at the right time;
• simplified our packages and oers, adding great value bundles
so our customers can get all of their communications needs from
us;
• invested in 40,000 hours of training for our customers’
operational teams; and
• proactively contacted our customers after the delivery of their
orders to check their products are working correctly and they’re
getting the most out of their new service.
We’re proud that our investment in our people and their
performance meant we were shortlisted for two awards, from the
British Quality Foundation and the Institute of Customer Service.
Transform our costs
Operating costs were down 2% due to savings made
through our cost transformation activities. The main
reason for the lower costs was a 4% reduction in our total
labour resource.
We’ve also made savings in other areas such as renegotiating
some supplier contracts, which has saved £29m this year.
Continued investment in back office systems and the migration
of customers onto the UK Business Solution has enabled greater
efficiencies.
Invest for growth
We’ve made significant investments in our products and
services. We want to meet customer needs and address
market opportunities across our three strategic portfolio
areas: fibre and connectivity; mobility and future voice;
and networked IT services.
We’ve invested to improve the speed, reach and quality of
broadband services by improving our network infrastructure.
We’ve invested in our managed compute cloud services product
and our future voice portfolio, focusing on delivering an excellent
customer experience.
We’ve helped more SMEs get online this year. Faster
broadband connections have been shown to really benefit
SMEs by increasing employee eectiveness, speeding up
the delivery of goods and improving their ability to develop
new services.
We joined a discount scheme backed by the Department
for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to encourage faster
adoption of superfast broadband.
We’re proud to be ranked the number one supplier by DCMS
ahead of 840 suppliers including Virgin Media and TalkTalk.
When the scheme closed in October 2015 we had provided
almost 8,800 SMEs across the UK with discounted superfast
connections.
Helping SMEs get faster connections
86%
86% of rms reported that their
broadband upgrade had increased
their employees’ eectiveness.
70%
Almost 70% reported increased
speed and reliability of delivering
goods or services.
45%
45% reported that the upgrade
had improved their ability to develop
new goods or services.
Source: Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
This year we migrated our exisiting mobile customers over to the
EE network, which means our customers can now access the UK’s
largest 4G mobile network.