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How right first time is key
Thursday November 13th 2008. Posted: 14:56
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Ian said BT aims to retrain and redeploy as many of its permanent people as possible
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The improvements BT is making in customer service will streamline the business and mean it requires fewer resources, BT chief executive Ian Livingston said today (Thursday).
Speaking at BT Centre in London at a presentation to analysts of BT’s second quarter and half year results, Ian said: “A lot of what we are doing is a result of getting things right first time. “Having fewer calls into call centres, fewer engineers having to go out, and less things being reworked means you need less resource to do it.” Ian explained that BT is focusing on what it calls “total labour resource” and said the majority of job losses will not be among directly-employed people but agency, third-party and offshore people. The company has been working on plans to reduce 10,000 jobs by the end of the financial year - and 4,000 have already gone. “We aim to retrain and redeploy as many of our permanent BT people as possible,” said Ian. “It’s the right thing to do and you save leaver costs. “Performance management is also important - something BT has not been very good at in the past. We have some great people doing great jobs and some people who aren’t doing a great job. We would like to help them improve but sometimes people can’t and it’s best for them and our customers that they no longer work at BT.” He estimated around 2,500 people would leave BT this year through performance management because their performance is not satisfactory. He said BT was also placing tight controls on recruitment Ian said that while BT Retail, BT Wholesale and Openreach are all delivering on or ahead of target, BT Global Services’ performance is not good enough. But he said because it has turned in revenue growth of 15 per cent, its recovery starts from a good position. “It’s achieving high service levels and winning industry awards and our customers are giving good feedback,” he said. “Of course, we’re not perfect but we are industry-leading. We have good sales growth and a good order pipeline. But we’re not delivering the bottom line.” Looking at BT’s performance overall, Ian said: “We feel BT is doing the right things. We feel it’s very important we start to deliver and then talk about the future. I recognise we talk too much about the future and let down on delivery and we’re going to change that.” Hanif Lalani, the new chief executive of BT Global Services, said he was instigating “a step change” in the business and looking to take the bold step of reducing the cost base. He said that, longer term, he believes it is possible for BT Global Services to reduce its cost base by hundreds of millions of pounds by cutting labour costs and duplication and by reducing the number of external suppliers around the world.
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Last updated:
09:56