BT Wholesale's new Business Zone portal is a derivative of the overall drive towards digitalisation within an environment where service and support matters more than ever, according to Josh Pert, Director of Multichannel Customer Experience, BT Wholesale.
Pert is right, dinosaur practices must be stamped out and new ways of doing things founded. Digital is now the preferred transaction method for many of BT Wholesale's customers and Pert has played a blinder to drive a transformation programme with the strategic momentum to differentiate through the service it offers to partners. "The transformation programme aims to provide a customer experience that makes it easier to do business with BT Wholesale," said Pert. "That means finding ways to allow our partners to spend more time engaging with their customers and less time and effort getting what they need from us."
The Business Zone portal is only the start of what will be a long-term transformational programme with process and automation at its heart. "Process is fundamental to this programme," he said. "Creating recognisable, componentised processes that work across the portfolio means we can quickly apply capabilities to new products or services. When onboarding and training resellers we can reduce the time for them to adopt new parts of the portfolio as all interactions and applications have a familiar functionality and flow. That means our partners can focus on their knowledge of the product rather than the systems that support them."
The transformation programme proves that automation is a benefit for everyone operating in the value chain, believes Pert. "As an industry we are all being driven to find new ways of delivering better returns in the face of fierce competition," he explained. "We believe that creating capabilities that drive convenience adds value, and that belief is underpinned by the partners who are working with us on trials of new functionality like Business Zone. A collaborative creation of tools means we have more confidence that we are delivering where it matters most for the customer."
Pert has a strong background in digital transformation and customer experience. Prior to joining BT he ran online transformation and multichannel projects for one of the big supermarkets and also for a global education business. "The role in BT Wholesale was interesting for me as it was my first real foray into a B2B business, and brought a host of new challenges when thinking about how to present an experience via digital tools," added Pert. "I hope one of the perspectives that I and the rest of the team bring to the business is insight into how we all use the web in our daily lives, and an ambition to translate some of those familiar experiences into a business environment to deliver simplicity.
"Understanding the complexity of the services that we support in telecoms is critical, but it's also vital to be able to step away from that detail at times and ask what the ideal customer or user experience would be, and then drive the necessary process change to achieve that. This is what we've done with Business Zone by taking literally hundreds of data points about service and presenting them in a way that is easy to digest at a summary level, and also easy to drill down into the detail where needed."
On taking his new role last summer Pert was impressed by the sheer breadth of the sector covering legacy through to next generation products, but the opportunity to deliver better service across the piece was obvious. "Given that many of the more technical aspects of delivery were never going to be fixed overnight we focused our efforts initially on areas like content quality to ensure that we were auditing and updating on a more regular basis," he said. "This is particularly challenging in a regulated environment where presentation and availability of certain information is an absolute necessity.
"We're now helping resellers by focusing on the integrated services at the forefront of our programme. The new ordering experience we've built for the Centrex product launched this quarter was developed in parallel with the service design. This approach ensures that we provide a highly intuitive experience for a complex set of services spanning connectivity, sites, users and software access right through to hardware.
"Whereas previously all of the elements of the service would have been procured separately they are now integrated into a single experience, removing long lead times and multiple touches to place an order. The increasing use of machine-to-machine transactions also offers resellers the opportunity to group services together on their own portal and place requests back in to us without any manual intervention."
Pert expects to see greater demand for more complex bundled solutions providing connectivity and over-the-top services that manifest themselves quite differently from a customer perspective, versus stand-alone services when it comes to experiences like billing, diagnostics, configuration and management. "The increasing availability of data and analytics will also allow us to give better, more proactive insights into how networks are operating and better information on service issues," he added.
The most significant trends on a market level are the move to the next generation of products that offer the ability to manage and configure continuously throughout the contract, believes Pert. "Now we have the opportunity to interact more frequently we should look at where that allows us to add value," he commented. "Our watchwords are 'simplicity, speed and engagement'. Get those three things right and you have an experience and a business that is not only dependable as a partner but also more valuable.
"As an industry we need to find ways to put the customer first in processes like switching, but that's often contradictory to commercial interests. Having said that, switching is just a symptom of not making a customer proposition compelling enough to be really sticky which doesn't always mean price. Service and support are increasingly the factors that will bind customers to you."
But the speed of change could threaten an organisation's ability to deliver impeccable service over the long-term unless real reform is undertaken with both eyes fixed beyond the horizon. So Pert has defined a proper balance of foresight and strategy to ensure that BT Wholesale remains ahead of the game. "The demand and needs of customers are changing so fast through our experience of software defined networks and cloud services that we need to be aiming far in front of the target in order to keep up," he said.
"In the short-term we'll continue to roll out Business Zone to more customers and also increase the breadth of products that are available through the portal. I also want to focus on some of the non-transactional aspects of our online presence to provide more insight and inspiration, and even the opportunity to collaborate across the industry."