Case Study: British Telecom Transformation
British Telecom (BT) - Business and Public Sector: improving Customer Experience
“Lateral’s method challenged us, ‘Are we really in touch with our customers’ experiences?’”
Trafford Wilson, Managing Director Customer Service and Transformation BT Business and Public Sector
3-6 months to initiate a dramatic Transformation
Brief:
We want our customer experience to be the best in market. Customers are making increased effort to navigate across BT. There are opportunities to improve BT’s service model efficiency and effectiveness.
Innovative Outcomes from the work, included:
“Modelled what the customer wanted and then improved priority customer journey by re-designing the organisation and processes around that”.
Tangible actions such as a live pilot in a UK call centre; locating all the necessary skills to answer customer calls at the same desk instead of different expertise located on different floors (e.g. sales, billing, faults). Resulting in customer issues being resolved at the one desk (no need for call transfers) and better customer experience.
“The work with Lateral was pivotal in initiating our Transformation, but... we did it!”
Client:
BT Business and Public Sector customer facing unit; serving 1.2m customers, including over half the FTSE 350, from small start-ups to large enterprises and public sector organisations. With 10,000 employees offering customers fixed, mobile, networking and IT services over the biggest UK fixed and mobile communications network.
Client results in first 12 months:
• NPS increase by +12pts
• Higher employee engagement +5%
• Lower cost as % of revenue
Data source: BT Group plc Annual Reports 2017 & 2018 (www.btplc.com/Sharesandperformance)
"NPS shows the cumulative movement in our customers' perception of BT since April 2016"
+ Results continued, improved metrics;
• Reduced repeats and transfers lowering cost per call
(Over half of transfers eliminated already)
• Shorter cycle times (customer order to connection)
• Improved customer transaction satisfaction
• Better customer journey satisfaction
• Decreased customer effort to get connected
• Reduced levels of waste
With further customer experience improvements in the pipeline …
“Lateral provides an outside-in methodology to enable businesses to quickly diagnose the priorities of a business from a customer’s point of view, rapidly deploying techniques to prioritise and solve these issues across the entire business and with the engagement of the entire business.”
Trafford Wilson, Managing Director
Customer Service and Transformation
BT Business and Public Sector
What we did
A key principle of Lateral’s work is taking as wide a view as possible of the problem space. This avoids the risk of developing a good solution to the wrong problem.
Working visually and live with the client team we co-created a room full of the insight gathered during research phases. Including;
Employees
We met a number of BT staff across all levels of the organisation and at several locations, hearing how big and complex the organisation is. However, behind this complexity we noticed dedicated, earnest and brilliant customer service teams wanting to deliver a great experience.
Customers
We interviewed current customers and heard stories of experiences that could be improved.
We brought the customer experience into the heart of BT, helping to understand real, live issues and problems from a customer perspective. We helped ‘shorten the gap’ between BT’s leadership team and customers.
“Lateral got in the room, working with people, and started looking at the problem straight away. Our internal team enjoyed the collaborative approach and work”
The work elevated a shared view for BT to solve with an outside-in customer experience perspective.
We explored the overall problem/solution space, allowing the team to focus on co-designing a range of tangible solutions from short term to more strategic opportunities.
“Lateral were able to work through complexity and consistently apply a methodology so that everyone knew their purpose and role”
Aligning all the individual perspectives within the room and co-created them into tangible actions; such as a live pilot in a UK call centre, in BT's words "our first Customer Experience Lab in Dundee to trial innovative customer service solutions and new ways of supporting our customers."
BT Business and Public Sector - Year 2
Data source: BT Group plc Annual Reports 2017 & 2018 (www.btplc.com/Sharesandperformance)
"NPS shows the cumulative movement in our customers' perception of BT since April 2016"
The team continue to build on their amazing success...
"This year our Net Promoter Score went up 12.1 points. That’s eight quarters of consistent improvement."
More in BT's words:
"Customer experience scores are all going in the right direction – NPS (+12.1), RFT (+5%), and call volumes (-15%)."
"We’ve also shared and adopted the best working practices of each organisation – using this to improve customer service levels and overall NPS." Improving Group NPS scores.
Next project
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Next project 〰️
Commencing October 2023
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Commencing October 2023 〰️
