Getting it right
Transformation is not something we can do a bit at a time,
tinkering with this, changing that. It’s a
full-on commitment. But some things don’t
change. Things like providing excellent customer service. Things
like developing and delivering innovative sales and marketing
programmes. Things like meeting our wider
responsibilities to the communities in which we operate.
What customers want
Getting it right for customers is, and will remain, our number one priority. We have the privilege of serving
more than 20 million customers and getting it
right for them is the best way of getting it
right for our shareholders.
We know what customers want.
They want all their contacts with BT to be
simple and complete.
We don’t always get it right – given
the number of transactions that we have with customers every day it would
be surprising if we did. But we never stop
working at it.
Two years ago, we set ourselves
the target of reducing levels of customer
dissatisfaction by 25% a year over three years on a compound annual basis.
Since then, we’ve achieved a 37% reduction in
the 2003 financial year and a 22% reduction in the 2004 financial
year.
Because customer service is at
the centre of everything we do, it’s one of the key objectives of our training
and development programmes.
For example, our retail
customer-facing and support teams participated in the
my customer training programme, designed
to improve our customers’ experience and
promote teamworking.
Examples of my
customer successes include the introduction of a new
contact centre structure that enables our people to handle more calls at the first point
of contact and enabling engineering and contact centre teams directly to
update customer records.
Reinventing the
traditional
But customers don’t just want an excellent
customer experience; they also want
communications services that add value to their lives – at home or at work – at
the right price.
In the consumer market, for
example, our BT Together packages, with
their choice of competitive call prices and fixed-fee options, are central to the
reinvention of our traditional voice business. As at 31 March 2004, BT Together had around nine million customers. In March 2004, we
announced we would abolish the BT standard rate
on 1 July 2004 to give
more value for money. Existing standard rate
customers will move to join those already on BT
Together Option 1, which will become the benchmark
for our fixed-line call prices.
And because we recognise that
our smaller business customers often prefer to
deal with other smaller companies, rather than large corporations, we’ve
been creating a number of BT Local Businesses
with exclusive access to such customers in a contained geographic patch. At
the end of the 2004 financial year, BT Local
Business was active in 73 locations, managing £1.1billion of annual
billed turnover.
BT Business Plan is designed to
give business customers greater certainty and
predictability when it comes to their
communications spend. During the year, we enhanced it by introducing a ten
pence price cap on calls to the US (the most
popular business route) and a 20 pence cap on calls to Europe and certain countries in
the Asia Pacific region. At 31 March 2004, we had more than 175,000 BT
Business Plan customers, an increase of more
than 700% on the previous
year.
Good
business
We also believe that the way in which we manage social, ethical and
environmental issues can contribute to business
success. We have, for example, demonstrated a
clear connection between the public perception of our social
responsibility activities and retail customer
satisfaction figures. And we are increasingly required to demonstrate BT’s commitment to
social and environmental issues when bidding for
business. In the 2004 financial year, we were required to demonstrate expertise in these matters in bids worth £900
million.
The fact that we are one of
the UK’s largest consumers of industrial and
commercial electricity imposes certain
responsibilities on us. That is why we’ve been investing in energy
conservation programmes. The use of renewable
energy and combined heat and power – together
with energy and transport efficiency measures – has enabled us to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by 42% since 1996.
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