BT: Top customer experience requires great employee experience
And digital transformation drives both.
Why You Should Care
BT is in the midst of a digital transformation journey.
It is working with ServiceNow to improve its employee experience, and therefore improve its customer service capabilities.
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Providing a best-in-class experience for customers is a top priority for telecommunications giant BT. But this is only possible if its 100,000 employees globally are happy, engaged and satisfied in their jobs.
Technology is a key part of BT’s business model – without its phone and broadband services thousands of individuals and companies would be unable to function and operate. Therefore, the employer is laser focused on digital transformation.
To this end, for the last 18 months, BT has been undergoing a group-wide transformation level to optimize customer and employee experience. A central part of these efforts, BT has consolidated 56 siloed, legacy systems into ServiceNow’s platform.
At ServiceNow’s 2022 World Forum in London, UNLEASH sat down with Dinesh Gottipati, BT’s head of ServiceNow platform software engineering, to find out more.
Digitalizing employee experience at BT
The ultimate aim of harmonizing all of BT’s different processes and tools into ServiceNow was “to give more power to our agents”, explains Gottipati. Having simple, intuitive technology is essential to having engaged and productive employees who, in turn, can support customers even better.
Gottipati is clear that BT is far from finished with its digital transformation journey – “the next quarters will be busy” – but there have already been successes to date.
One example is the launch of a modern, scalable, user-friendly portal, which provides one centralized place for employees to easily communicate problems, and therefore avoid duplication and speed up problem solving and resolution of customer queries. This contributes to BT’s aim of streamlining and creating “consistency” around employee workflows.
Credit: BT.
BT has also rolled out a mobile app version of ServiceNow’s platform for the IT services division, including its 50,000 frontline employees.
By untethering ServiceNow’s capabilities from the office, the app empowers employees “to do some of their operations on the fly” – for instance, teams working on critical issues in the field could get notifications on their phones about incidents or problems, and then be able to respond immediately.
The app roll-out started off as a pilot, and then employees were invited to sessions to share their feedback on how to continue to optimize the app for their needs. BT is planning to continue to work with ServiceNow to improve the app experience and capabilities based on employee listening.
Employee feedback is a theme across BT’s whole digital transformation journey. The employer also ran bootcamps to upskill employees on the ServiceNow platform – these generated questions and insights about future innovations and implementations.
Automating work at BT
Artificial intelligence (AI) has moved away from being a buzzword and is having real business impacts. For instance, it can help inform decision making by analyzing – at speed – large data-sets and it is indispensable in tackling cybersecurity challenges.
However, most relevant uses of AI to BT and its employee experience transformation are its power to automate routine, manual tasks and boost productivity, as well as yield efficiencies around a company’s relationships with its customers.
With the help of ServiceNow, BT has launched virtual agent chatbot. It has a dual self-service purpose for both customers and employees.
For employees, the chatbot means they don’t waste time navigating through systems and datasets to access the right information.
According to Gottipati, “it actually gives them ready-made insights” so they can do their jobs, including supporting customers, even better.
The virtual agent also empowers BT customers to “do some self-service” find answer for themselves. This frees up employees from more manual tasks, and instead they can focus on value-adding work.
Dinesh Gottipati, head of ServiceNow platform software engineering, BT.
Beyond these self-service journeys, BT is also using automation to streamline and simplify its ticketing process for customer queries.
Like the employee portal, the aim here is to avoid duplication and drive efficiencies for employees and customers alike.
ServiceNow isn’t the only tech vendor supporting BT with automation and its wider digital transformation, Gottipati tells UNLEASH “we’re trying to get a lot of other world class tools” into BT.
BT is already working with cloud vendors Dynatrace and Google Cloud, and they’re helping the company to get “real-time data insights…to really deliver that optimal experience”.
But “we have got some amazing roll-outs planned in the next few quarters”. That’s going to help the telecoms giant create high quality employee experiences and mean that “current and future team members [can] be fearless customer-obsessed creators”.
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