BT has received an award from Analyst Frost & Sullivan for excellence in Customer Service Innovation. According to Frost & Sullivan, BT’s radical customer service programmes have excelled in several areas, including improving customer satisfaction levels; reducing churn rate; reduction in operational costs whilst maintaining high levels of satisfaction; responsiveness to customer needs; and monitoring and addressing customer feedback.

Frost & Sullivan applauded BT's Service Strategy: “In the last few months, BT Global Services has implemented a radical company wide programme that focuses on improving customer service.”

“The strategic vision for this programme is to not only defend traditional business by improving service and reduce cost, but also grow new wave business such as broadband and global solutions. The aim is to transform the customer experience and increase the speed to market of new products and services. It will help BT Global Services build up long term partnerships with its customers.”

“BT Global Services’ customer service management team is focused on delivering proactive management and improved communication and engagement with customers. They try to achieve this goal by having clear end-to-end ownership and accountability plus providing standard operating processes and systems. The key strategic focus areas include customer satisfaction, communications and team performance and motivation.”

“The unique global service operating model demonstrates BT Global Services’ key capabilities, from service relationship management and service delivery to service assurance and support. Many transformation programmes have been implemented in the aim to transform the current focus on service delivery to service relationship management.”

“One of the most significant programmes is called Leading the Market in Customer Satisfaction. The goals include increasing customer satisfaction level while at the same time decreasing dissatisfaction level. BT Global Services aims to be customers’ natural partner with lower churn rate than its major competitors.”

“The Customer Insight Programme is another example that proves BT Global Services’ dedication to improve customer satisfaction. It focuses on monitoring and addressing customer feedback by having regular customer partnership council and one-to-one meetings with top customer executives. Regular surveys with customers are aimed to conduct situational analysis, root cause analysis and develop customer-specific service improvement plans.”

“All these programmes demonstrate BT Global Services’ customer-centric vision from pre-sale communication to point-of-sale interaction and post-sales experience. BT Global Services’ vision is to shift from a product-orientated business to a service-oriented business that has long-term relationships with customers. It’s aiming to shift from providing network services to providing networked IT services, which offer customers more value-added technologies and services.”

“Although the programme has just been implemented for a few months, the result has become a very positive indication of BT Global Services’ customer satisfaction strategy. It has resulted in the sharp decrease of very dissatisfied customers while the number of (very) satisfied customers continues to grow.”

“BT Global Services has certainly benefited from its customer-centric approach. Its customer satisfaction focus is a company-wide engagement that enables BT Global Services to gain higher customer satisfaction, and thus leads to higher customer loyalty.”

Receiving this award, Roel Louwhoff, President Customer Service for BT Global Services commented: “This is an outstanding achievement for BT. As we continually strive to improve our customer service, we are very proud that our efforts have not only gained recognition from customers - as shown through increased satisfaction ratings - but have also resulted in recognition of our service leadership from several industry analysts. The perception of our customer service is changing and this is due to our relentless focus on improving customer satisfaction and on communicating what we are doing to analysts, media and customers.”