Right here' right now

On every job, our personal best.

That’s the culture that’s been spreading like wildfire through Openreach recently.  While it sounds like common sense, it’s about sealing everything we do with a label of pride - however small or large, simple or complex, whether in the office or out in the field.

Getting things right first time for our customers is a priority for everyone within Openreach. It’s about making sure that we deliver what we promise, when it is expected and without any quality issues or failures.

Delivering exceptionally good customer service is critical to our success and that of our customers. So much so that the Right First Time programme boasts its own initiatives, funding and activities.

This focus of Right First Time reflects our customers’ business drivers.

Business growth – it’s no surprise that new customers and the loyalty of existing customers is earned through reputation, reliability and strong relationships. Openreach’s devotion to getting it Right First Time instils these values and focuses on helping our customers to grow.

Reduced lost time – pre-appointment calling and keeping our customers informed reduces the amount of wasted time throughout our processes, which in turn improves the quality of interaction between us, our customers and the end user.

Improved efficiency – reducing wasted time leads to the reduction of costs, which ultimately benefits all our customers. Right First Time therefore offers positive commercial impacts too.

Improved profitability – improved cost efficiency, reduced lost time and a growing business where customers get the service they expect, adds up to a more profitable business all round.

“The Right First Time programme is centred around improving what we have today and doing it even better for tomorrow. The programme also encourages us all to think more about the consequences of the decisions we make and solutions we put in place and to take pride in every job we complete, whether in the office or out in the field.”

“Engagement of our people is of course paramount to this programme,” added Micaela Cook, Head of Right First Time Communications.

“In order to capture how Openreach operates and to canvass feedback on how we can improve at each stage, a ’rich picture‘ was commissioned to illustrate the challenge and draw together all the components of the system we operate”.

“By visually representing the interdependency of the teams it helped to identify the key areas where we needed to work together in order to achieve our shared objectives.”

The detailed analysis that followed highlighted a number of critical areas for improvement across Openreach. This included looking at the causes of faults, tackling repeat fault reports, examining the flow of work throughout the provision and repair processes and of course improving our interface and interaction with customers.

Much of the excellent work that has been done with our customers, such as introducing quality gates and improving test and diagnostics, has had a positive knock-on effect throughout the rest of the process. Jobs are more detailed and accurate. This means they flow through our systems with minimal intervention and provide the right field engineers with the right information to do the job as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Right First Time is not an overnight wonder, nor will it be achieved without a lot of commitment and hard work. But Openreach is committed to driving customer service excellence and therefore invites all customers to provide their feedback as things progress.