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Collaboration with communications providers brings success in BT hub
BT is collaborating with communications provider (CP) customers to better understand the root causes of faults and how they can be managed more effectively and avoided wherever possible.
Since January 2009, a number of sessions have taken place at BT's Diagnostic Development Hub in the IT centre at Adastral Park in Suffolk, with companies including The Carphone Warehouse, Tiscali and Sky...
BT is developing five Global Development Centres worldwide, in Ipswich (Adastral Park), Pune (India), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Dalian (China) and Dallas (USA). All of them are operational except Amsterdam, which is in development.
The invitation-only hub sessions bring together all the experts dealing with the supply of specific products and services to share their experiences, improve information flow, increase understanding and drive best practice. Customer service agents from the CP work alongside BT people from different parts of the supply chain to tackle the issues together.
Before coming into the hub, a CP is invited to identify its biggest issues. BT analyses this data ahead of each two-day hub session.
Frontline agents
The teams examine the entire customer journey to identify where improvements can be made, and to check that BT and the CP have the right diagnostic process and systems in place. The aim is to reduce the time it takes to resolve faults, prevent the same faults from occurring again and deliver Right First Time.
The hubs are the brainchild of Chris Garner, head of customer experience transformation programmes in BT Innovate & Design, who said: "During the hub sessions the CP's frontline agents take faults from their customers and follow them through to Openreach. We invite service management people from Openreach - the people who receive the faults from the CPs - and then we follow the fault all the way through to the field engineers, who also come into the hub. We do it the other way around, too, to check what happens when the reported fault goes back down the chain to the CP.
"We find that many faults can be resolved by very small process changes that could make quite a difference to the CP in terms of their cost base, cycle time and customer experience.
"Both organisations learn from one another. We're helping CPs to improve their diagnostic process and systems, to prevent investigation faults going into Openreach.
"We have received encouragement from the Office of the Telecommunications Adjudicator (OTA), saying the concept of the hub is the way CPs should be working more closely with Openreach."
Chris said there has been a wealth of positive feedback from participating customers about their diagnostic hub experience. One described it as "a platform for delivering change throughout the industry."
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