BT Transforms Online Presence And Maintains Brand Consistency With Interwoven

Published 10th September 2007

BT moves at the speed of the Web by empowering business users...

GARTNER PORTALS AND COLLABORATION SUMMIT, London, UK, – 6 September 2007 – BT, one of Europe’s leading providers of telecommunications services, manages a significant Web presence. The company manages over 350 external sites and over 600 internal sites and generates as many as seven to eight million hits per day on its home page alone. Given this, BT set out to reduce the complexity of its content management infrastructure and move from a completely centralised publishing model to more of a distributed model. In addition, it wanted to empower business users with more self-service control of their content, reducing the cycle time required to update content online, and delivering a superior customer experience.

In order to achieve this, BT deployed Interwoven’s Web content management platform, Interwoven TeamSite, across its four lines of business: BT Global Services, Openreach, BT Retail and BT Wholesale. The increased consistency and availability of information on the Web has enabled faster time-to-market for new products and services. In addition, by empowering the business users to create their own content, BT has accelerated time-to-Web to a single day or less.

“Implementing Interwoven has played an essential role in facilitating BT’s strategy to deliver a more fluid experience to our customers,” said Paul Farnsworth, program director at BT Design, BT Group's IT design and delivery business. “Using Interwoven’s Web content management solution has radically improved our time-to-Web from just thinking about making a change on the sites, to seeing it come to fruition. This has been valuable in a range of scenarios from creating promotions to faster response times to customers. We can now deliver the right content, at the right time, to the right audience across all channels.”

BT maintains its central team for the quality control of its content — changes are now made twice daily compared to once a week. With the ability to template pages in advance and upload content faster, the information is fresh and consistent with the business as it rapidly evolves. Customer experience is consistent at all touch points, so BT’s customers receive the same high standards of service, be it on the Web or with one of the call centres.

Farnsworth added, “BT.com aims to achieve consistency across the organisation both internally and externally. BT receives more than 90 million phone calls per year into our call centres and some of the customers have been with us for as long as 70 years. We are adapting the way we deliver our services, aside from the Web, by having the call centre agents use the same tools for the website to maintain consistency. It is also a challenge to launch a new product and make it completely Web-centric when we still have customers who are more inclined to reach for the phone.”

In 2004, BT devised the “Netcentricity” program to promote consistency across all touch points, reaching the right audiences, at the right time. A primary goal was to increase the efficiency of “assisted self-service” as a way to help lower transaction costs and direct more customer transactions to online channels. The team at BT pays close attention to the ratio of online transactions to total transactions, or its “Netcentricity Index”, and uses it as a vivid indicator of the success of its implementation. For its most recent fiscal year (2006-2007), BT has achieved a blended Netcentricity index of 22 per cent and a margin contribution of £57M (approx. $115M USD).

Farnsworth concludes, “Our next wave of IP-based telecommunications applications will drive people to the Internet in increasing numbers. Customers will expect a richer experience on the Web and we must be well-poised to accelerate the speed at which we introduce new products and services to them via online channels. Interwoven enables us to deliver on these requirements.”

Gartner Portals and Collaboration Summit--London

On Thursday, September 6, 2007, Paul Farnsworth, Program Director for BT Design, will lead a presentation to discuss how BT’s content management platform optimises its eCommerce strategy to enable the next wave of IP-based telecommunications applications. Find out how the integration of Interwoven TeamSite® content management software and portal technology has enabled BT to accelerate time-to-market for new products and services while delivering a seamless experience for customers, employees, and suppliers.