BT: Transforming the Customer Experience

By Michelle Rovner

The world of communications is undergoing pervasive change, paving the way for a variety of new broadband services for consumers and businesses. No company is better positioned to seize that opportunity than BT. Over the past several years, BT has transformed itself from a traditional telephony operator into a leading global communications provider with £8.5 billion in revenues in 2005, and 18.3 million customers in the UK and Ireland. The company achieved this transformation by investing in a next-generation network infrastructure that currently brings broadband Internet access to more homes in Britain than have access to water mains.

Today, with broadband availability in the UK at almost 100 percent, BT is again evolving its business and expanding its relationships with customers by focusing on a new wave of services designed around the convergence of networks and services, mobile and fixed communications and media. For example, earlier this year, BT Retail, a division within BT Group plc, unveiled its ultra-fast, nationwide 8 Mbps broadband network, designed to support a new portfolio of services such as the groundbreaking BT Vision, which combines broadcast digital TV with on-demand film, TV and music programming. BT’s mission is to help its customers easily integrate these new services into their lives, enriching the way they work and play.

“We don’t bring technology, we bring services to the customer,” says Stratis Scleparis, chief technology officer of BT Retail. “We are committed to providing services that enhance our customers’ lives, but in order to be successful, they must also be easy and simple to use.” That important distinction led BT to Austin, Texas-based Motive, Inc., a leading provider of broadband management software. Motive’s software allows BT to automate and remotely manage many of the complex tasks required to deploy, configure and support broadband services, ensuring a positive and consistent customer experience. Because BT had planned the release of several new, innovative services this year, working with Motive to simplify the rollout and management of these services was a key strategic goal.

Laying the Foundation for the Digital Home

As part of its efforts to pave the way for more feature-rich services, BT launched BT Total Broadband in July 2006. In addition to increasing download speeds to up to 8 Mbps, the service also offers free Internet voice and video calls, and a suite of security software providing online protection against identity theft, spam email, pop-ups, viruses and hackers—all brought together through a residential gateway device called the BT Home Hub.

The heart of BT’s digital home, BT Home Hub acts as the central delivery mechanism for new broadband services such as wireless networking for all of a family’s PCs and laptops, Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), and voice calls over the Internet. The ability to remotely manage the BT Home Hub is crucial to BT’s strategy, as it is the platform from which all of the company’s next-generation services to the home will be launched. The company turned to Motive, a strategic partner that BT has worked with for several years, to automate the installation, management and self-help features of its broadband services for both the home and businesses.

From its own research, BT knew that customers who were not empowered with Motive solutions for broadband installation and self-help were five times more likely to call customer service for assistance. In fact, over the past year, Motive’s automated solutions have saved BT more than a million support calls and prompted a quarter of a million text-chat sessions. “Customers have told us they prefer self-service whenever possible. If they have to call for help, it is already a negative experience in their minds,” says Scleparis.

Scleparis says he insists on delivering that same quality customer experience as the company continues to introduce new services. “Providing superior customer service remains our top priority. It’s what differentiates BT from other providers in the market,” he explains. To meet that requirement, BT chose Motive Home Device Manager™ (HDM) to manage its BT Home Hub offering. With Home Device Manager, BT can remotely manage the Home Hub and deliver service updates. For instance, BT has done firmware upgrades to 500,000 Hubs to bring them in line with the introduction of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7.

“We were very impressed by Motive’s proven interoperability with a wide range of routers and devices, and with its commitment to evolving DSL Forum standards,” says Scleparis. “Their vision of the future in these areas aligns very closely to our own. Motive HDM gives us the flexibility to select our CPE (customer premise equipment) from a wide range of products with the confidence that we will be able to support them, without developing yet another system,” says Scleparis.

Using Motive HDM, BT is able to activate thousands of BT Home Hubs per month via automated, “zero-touch” provisioning, and will soon follow suit with its Business Hub service. With sales of more than 500,000 BT Home Hubs to date, the rollout has been most successful. In addition to provisioning the service, customer service representatives also use Motive HDM to get a diagnostic view of the BT Home Hub, including real-time information about alarms and performance issues, and to remotely deploy automated fixes and firmware upgrades.

“Since we launched Motive HDM, we have derived significant savings from avoiding router firm-ware re-flashes in the warehouse before dispatch,” states Scleparis. The company’s estimated savings for automated firmware upgrades is about £5 for each CPE over manual upgrades. To date, BT has upgraded about 150,000 CPE through the Motive HDM solution, yielding nearly £750,000 in savings, not including the benefits of faster deployment.

Launching Next-Generation IP Television

With its Home Hub in place, BT has now launched the much anticipated BT Vision, a next-generation IPTV service that puts the viewer in control by combining the appeal of TV with the interactivity of broadband. BT Vision’s extensive library of on-demand content includes movies, music videos, concerts, children’s programming, and recent and classic television programming including drama, comedy and documentaries.

To strengthen this offering, BT forged a host of premier content deals with world-class entertainment companies such as BBC Worldwide, Paramount and Warner Music Group. In a unique move, BT requires no subscription or minimum monthly payment for the service. Customers can subscribe to genres of content or pay as they go. This flexible pricing model gives BT customers more control over what they watch, when they watch it and how they pay for it.

“BT Vision is a cornerstone in our next-generation strategy. It will transform the way our customers see us and the way we behave as a company, requiring even more agility and responsiveness to succeed in the converged world,” says Scleparis.

BT’s customer-focused strategy is evident in its future plans for BT Vision. For example, the company plans to introduce new interactive features based on audience participation, including voting, gaming and communications that enable customers to chat with each other or use video telephony to talk face-to-face while watching programs. With such cutting-edge capabilities, BT expects to have connected hundreds of thousands of customers by the end of 2007 and aims to have two to three million in the next few years.

End-to-End Service Assurance

The convergence of broadband Internet and telephony technologies promises to bring customers a rich variety of new services such as BT Vision. The difficulty lies in managing all of the technology pieces required to deliver those services. The process of configuring the service, and identifying and resolving problems, is not limited to one piece of equipment. Instead, every element in the delivery chain affects the customer experience. Visibility into the set-top box within the home provides only one view of the quality of service the customer is receiving.

For BT to guarantee high-quality video-on-demand, the company must not only manage the box, it must also ensure throughput from BT’s head-end to the Home Hub at the customer’s premises. “It’s important to establish a quality end-to-end link with service guarantees, because when everyone in the neighborhood is connected, throughput can drop,” explains Scleparis. “With Motive solutions, we can guarantee the quality of the service. Motive’s HDM technology will be a key component in our strategy to manage our BT Vision customers end-to-end including LAN and router management capability. We are excited by the new possibilities with TR069-compliant devices and the interaction this could give with Motive HDM to enhance the quality and diagnostics of the network. Our strategy is to monitor our services at both the transmission and application layer providing end-to-end assurance capability,” he adds.

Motive solutions provide a unified, global view of all the service elements in the delivery chain to customer service representatives, so that any disruptions can be proactively managed. “Enabling customers with the self-help capabilities to fix simple problems is part of the solution, but we now can fix problems before the customer even knows one exists,” says Scleparis.

It’s a good strategy for a company with the stated goal of providing services on every device the consumer uses to receive digital services, including phones, game consoles, PCs and televisions. BT is already moving ahead with that strategy, and recently received the Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award from the Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC®) for BT.

Fusion—the world’s first seamless fixed-mobile phone service

BT Fusion works like a normal mobile phone but switches automatically onto a BT broadband line via a BT Home Hub when a subscriber gets to the home or office. The service offers all the convenience and features of a mobile phone, but with fixed-line prices and quality. “It’s an exciting time to be part of BT,” says Scleparis. “We feel confident we’ll win customer loyalty by offering the highest quality, easiest-to-use, and most innovative services.” With a strategy that centers on delivering the ultimate customer experience, it appears that BT is already succeeding.