Business Profile

BT is one of Europe’s leading providers of telecommunications services. Its principal activities include local, national and international telecommunications services, higher-value broadband and Internet products and services, and Information Technology (IT) solutions. In the UK, BT serves over 21 million corporate and residential customers with more than 28 million exchange lines, as well as provides network services to other licensed operators.

Industry: Telecommunications

Challenges

 Benefits

BT wanted to establish its image as an innovator and ensure market share in the fastest growing sector in which it competes — broadband. With the introduction of BT Broadband in the fall of 2002, BT laid the foundation to become a leading provider of broadband in the UK market. BT has already completed more than 500,000 broadband connections as of January 2003 and is aggressively targeting one million broadband connections by summer 2003 and five million by 2006. In order to win in one of the most competitive markets in Europe, BT launched one of the largest marketing campaigns ever undertaken in the UK. To handle the demand from this campaign and ensure a positive customer experience, BT Retail built a solid, robust and scalable infrastructure to automate its broadband order entry and processing.

BT Retail knew that getting the campaign and the fulfillment process done right and on-time were the keys to success. BT Retail drew on its previous successful experience with Vitria’s BusinessWare to supply the integration technology and gateway management for the broadband ordering process. During a pilot project Vitria’s BusinessWare had previously been used to integrate the order management processes for BT’s Digital Office product. The results pointed to improved customer service levels and reducing transactional costs with suppliers from integrating processes and applications across and beyond the enterprise.

BT Retail Enhances Customer

With the launch of broadband, BT’s residential and small business customers now have a simpler alternative for using the Internet over a single phone line. BT wanted to reflect the ease of the product with a simple, reliable customer fulfillment experience. As part of the broadband roll out, BT focused on getting as many customers as possible up and running quickly on the service to ensure a great customer experience and drive loyalty.

Improving Order Process

BT Retail deemed speed and scalability to be essential in expediting order processing and increasing customer satisfaction. The targeted customer base was the consumer segment, which meant taking and fulfilling orders quickly was a key requirement.

In addition, BT Retail wanted to be easy to deal with and enable enrollment wherever and whenever it was most convenient for the customer. Thus, they ensured that customers could sign up through call centers or via the Internet, anytime. A key factor in successfully taking and processing the BT Broadband customers’ orders is the hub built on Vitria’s BusinessWare platform. For the ordering process, BT Broadband takes the customers orders, via call centers and the Internet, installs the service and begins the billing procedures.

The order process is powered by BusinessWare which appropriately routesand processes these orders through the system, eventuallyconverging all of the information into one easy-to-access file,giving the customer service representatives (CSRs) a real-timeview of customers’ history and needs. Using BusinessWare hasalso eliminated the need to enter and re-enter data manually atmany different points in the process, thus saving time anddecreasing the number of errors. The order entry call handlingtime has been reduced by 25 percent since broadband waslaunched, with the average transaction taking eight minutes orless. The number of customers ordering online is continuing togrow with more than 20 percent placing their orders throughthe Internet. As broadband growth continues, online orderingis expected to expand to about 40 percent of all orders placed.

BusinessWare is designed to scale to handle the rising number of order entries coming through the Internet. “We are very pleased with the order entry process. The time spent ordering services has been drastically reduced, and with an error rate of only one percent, we are able to quickly recover orders that are in jeopardy as they are discovered,” said Doyle. Turning a request for broadband service into a satisfied customer takes time and many steps. BT Retail wanted to have the visibility to manage the entire order fulfillment process. As Doyle explained, “The processes involved in connecting customers to BT Broadband can take as long as five days to complete — from initially taking the customer order, checking availability, dispatching equipment and notifying BT Wholesale to provision the network, and eventually billing the customer. The integration solution implemented had to therefore be able to support the long life order management processes involved, ensuring optimum customer service levels are maintained across the completeorder lifecycle. Vitria does that very well.”

Scalability and Dependability

With an expected one million ADSL customers online by summer 2003, and a targeted five million connections by summer 2006, scalability and real-time transaction processingto- provisioning, is imperative for the continued success of BT Broadband. “This will result in an increased load on the order management process. We are confident that Vitria’s BusinessWare will provide us with the scalability to meet the expected demand for broadband services,” said Doyle.

The system has already been put to the test with a peak load of over 1,000 being handled successfully. The BT Broadband systems will continue to be challenged as more people want to come online with broadband as a result of continued, extensive marketing efforts and the growth of the number of households who own computers.

With this growth in mind, Vitria and BT Broadband built an architecture anticipating a future of ever growing wired homes and small businesses. And these services represent the first step toward establishing BT as the customer’s provider-of-choice for creating the fully networked home and office. BusinessWare has already proven its dependability and value at BT Retail, when during a major power outage it continued to function as expected. As Doyle explained, “When the power came back and all systems were re-booted, not one broadband order had been lost. The power outage was completely transparent to customers who were logging into the system and using or signing up for broadband, as no functionality was affected by the loss of power.”

Customer Service

Customer service can be the linchpin in the success of any product, and this is a key focus for BT Retail. Vitria is enabling BT to enhance customer service through the use of automated order management. By integrating key applications such as BT’s customer relationship management (CRM) and billing systems, BusinessWare is providing BT with the capability to process high numbers of broadband subscribers quickly and efficiently. After the customer orders are taken, they are processed through the Siebel CRM system and passed on to the back-end systems via BusinessWare. Vitria integrated BT’s Siebel CRM solution with its existing billing system, as well as with the Broadband ordering gateway for BT Wholesale to create a single, streamlined, automated ordering process.

As part of the customer service plan, BT Broadband relied on Vitria’s BusinessWare to provide support to the gateways and processes required to stay in control of the information throughout all stages of the process. BT managers knew that the launch of a new broadband initiative would require seamless end-to-end processes and complete order status visibility for CSRs. “Since the rollout in 2002, the overall customer service rating has been above 80 percent, with a less than 10 percent dissatisfaction level — which is above initial targets,” stated Doyle.

Fast Development Ensures Rapid Time-to-Market

BT Retail was looking to expand into the broadband market and needed to build a system quickly in order to execute on this plan. In choosing Vitria’s BusinessWare to provide the integration layer for the architecture, BT accelerated the development cycle and launched its broadband offerings ahead of schedule. Originally, BT was planning a traditional approach to developing their product, which would have taken 15-18 months. With the aid of Vitria’s solutions, BT went from a process project conception, to volume launch in just nine months; that’s a nine month time saving for BT. Things went so smoothly for development that the pilot testing was scaled back and completed ahead of schedule. This saving helped BT release the product on time.

A Driver for Revenue

Vitria’s value has already been proven with BT’s ability to handle increased broadband orders per hour in real-time. Streamlining the process, saving money, and time were mission critical for the successful launch of BT’s broadband offerings. By incorporating Vitria’s BusinessWare into the process and reducing not only months of development time, but also thousands of manpower hours per month, BT was able to execute ahead of schedule and within budget projections.

BT is committed to widening the reach of broadband across the UK and into geographical areas not easily reached commercially. Broadband is at the center of BT’s strategy, and they are making products available, pricing them competitively, and focusing on customer service to help make these implementations successful. “Vitria and BusinessWare are at the heart of new revenue growth for BT. First it was BusinessWare for BT Retail, then BusinessWare for BT Broadband and coming this fall BusinessWare will be powering BT’s launch as a Mobile Service Provider. Vitria continues to be a part of BT and grows with us as we release new and more robust product offerings to our customers,” concluded Doyle.