Growth through transformation

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Traditional business 
Transformation may be a way of life, but that doesn’t mean everything has to change. We will continue to provide all our customers in our traditional markets with an excellent customer experience. Our values – trustworthy, helpful, inspiring, straightforward, heart – continue to define the way we do business around here. Our people continue to live these values. And being a good corporate citizen is as important now as it’s ever been.

Keep a relentless focus on improving customer satisfaction
Reducing customer dissatisfaction is a key objective for us. In the 2005 financial year, for the third year in a row, all lines of business reduced customer dissatisfaction levels. In total, we have achieved a group-wide reduction of 23% on a compound annual basis over the past three years.

Transforming the traditional
Of course, transformation and tradition are not mutually exclusive and there’s nothing to say we shouldn’t find new ways to do the things we’ve always done.

In July 2004, for example, we abolished the standard rate for telephone calls for all our residential customers and switched them to BT Together Option 1, offering them better value for money and making it easier for them to compare our prices with those of our competitors. We also introduced Call Mobile, a discount package offering customers savings of up to 40% on all fixed-to-mobile calls.

For business customers, we cut the cost of fixed-to-mobile calls by between 25% and 30% and offered BT Business Plan customers the option of a 30 pence cap on all such calls lasting less than an hour. As at 31 March 2005 , BT Business Plan had over 440,000 locations – up 67% on the 2004 financial year.

Customer protection remains vitally important to us, which is why we’ve been helping to combat the menace of rogue internet diallers. BT Modem Protection, for example, is a free service designed to prevent a customer’s computer dialing high-cost, premium rate or international numbers. At the end of March 2005, around one million customers had signed up for one or more of our barring options.

Drive for cost leadership
We remain focused on financial discipline and our cost efficiency programmes achieved savings of around £400 million in the 2005 financial year. This has enabled us to invest in growing our new wave activities. We aim to deliver at least £300 million to £400 million of savings in each of the next three years.

We can’t starve ourselves to success, but reducing the costs of failure, complexity and duplication and generally working smarter increases the scope we have to invest for growth. And technology really can contribute to the cause. At the end of the financial year, for example, we had a total of 6.2 million online relationships with customers through our website (bt.com) and almost two million customers receiving e-bills.