TRANSFORMING OUR COSTS

We remain focused on financial discipline and on delivering efficiency programmes to generate sustainable cost savings.
     We continue to benchmark ourselves against the best in the industry. In the 2007 financial year, efficiency programmes delivered savings of over £500 million, enabling us to invest in growing our new wave activities and increase our profits.
     A key area of focus has been enhancing the ways in which customers can deal with BT, simultaneously saving costs and improving customer service. Programmes have targeted the cost of failure by, for example, minimising the number of times a customer call is transferred before resolution and reducing the amount of call waiting time through better call routing.
     The number of transactions completed via bt.com rose by more than 90% in the 2007 financial year. And at 31 March 2007, we had over 2.8 million customers receiving e-bills – up 22% in the financial year – over 900,000 of whom do not receive a paper bill – a 90% increase on 31 March 2006.
     We have also been reducing the complexity of our systems and processes. (See IT Support)
     Other programmes relate to innovative procurement and sourcing and we continue to look at ways of streamlining our organisation and eliminating duplication.
     We also continued to reduce overheads such as accommodation, using buildings more efficiently and introducing flexible working practices. In the 2007 financial year, we vacated around 40 buildings and installed an additional 1,300 flexible workstations which can be shared by multiple users.

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