A simpler approach to service

In Customer Service we dedicate ourselves to providing customers with a simple and complete service experience, wherever they are.

Our commitment to customer satisfaction is recognised by our customers and the wider industry alike. Recent BT accolades for customer service include the prestigious Best Customer Care award from the World Communication Awards (WCA) in November 2007.

Simple and complete global customer experience

BT does truly provide a simple and complete global customer experience. You do business with one company through one global service offer.

BT is investing around €90m on improving customer service, implementing a programme ranging from simplifying our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) infrastructure and incident reporting processes - through to improving the consistency of our delivery and the availability of our networks.

Customer Portal

BT's customer portal is a newly upgraded, leading-edge, eService tool that manages your service needs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, wherever the Internet is available. It provides a wealth of realtime information to extend your control of network support operations and improve communications. Recent enhancements include:

• an easier-to-use interface,
• a single multi-lingual view of customer tickets and orders, accessible using a wider range of browsers,
• contextual help to guide you through all functions.

BT's customer portal is a comprehensive suite of e-service management applications. It includes numerous features to help you monitor even the most complex network more effectively and provides all the information you need to make more informed decisions to optimise your network availability and performance.

BT's customer portal is designed to enhance your support relationship with BT and our service suppliers. It is available globally and across the full range of BT offerings, and provides realtime access to back-office information - not just a static view of 'cleansed' data.

BT's customer portal provides an online window to a wealth of information to help you take more control, enhance support and improve network availability. You can communicate online with BT and our service providers quickly and efficiently, without any language or geographic limitations, to check the status of any outstanding issues.

Benefits

• Provides advanced support via the Internet 24 hours day.
• Is free of charge and requires no additional hardware or software.
• Ensures you have access to all the information you need to manage your network to maximum availability.
• Provides a useful tool to help speed up the fault diagnostic process.
• Saves time and increases your control.
• Guarantees fast resolution of any problems.

Key features

• Trouble Ticket Status: view online ticket status.
• Ticket Creation: easy-to-use trouble ticket creation facility enables you to specify a fault and set severity levels online.
• Order Status: review online status of placed order.
• Order Request: place simple order requests online.
• Product Performance Reports: view or download reports online.
• Product Traffic Reports: view or download reports online.  
• Planned Maintenance Notices: receive online notices about upcoming maintenance.
• Critical Outage Notices: receive on-line notices about critical outages.
• Shared Web Folders (50+ Mb per customer): share information online with your (service) account team.
• Targeted Messaging: Receive online messages specifically addressing your company or your services.

Technical specification

In order to access BT's customer portal you need a PC with internet access. The url is:
https://www.myaccount.globalservices.bt.com. A secure username and password can be provided by your account manager.

Configuration is required including:

• PC with internet access (Fixed or Dial-Up).
• Netscape Version 4.0 or higher, Internet Explorer Version 5.0 or higher and Firefox.

Companies are also required to configure their browsers to accept 'cookies' to gain access to BT's customer portal.

Access to BT's customer portal is via a secure Web ID and PIN. User Authentication includes server based Verisign certificates to provide 128-bit SSL encryption of the communication channel between the client PC and the reverse proxy server.

What is Converged Service Management?

Global connectivity is steadily converging with ever-improving IT. Businesses are looking for global communications solutions that integrate networks and IT services into a single business infrastructure that they can rely on to operate their business. Today it is not possible to consider networks and IT in isolation, as the way they interact is key to business performance, and therefore a converged approach to their management is required.

Converged Service Management from BT focuses on managing both networks and IT through their lifecycle as a consistent service management process to meet the business requirements of your organisation. The process is underpinned by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) good practice which is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world.

ITIL provides a comprehensive, consistent and coherent set of good practices, which BT is using for Converged Service Management to deliver service excellence and business effectiveness and efficiency.

ITIL processes underpin – but do not dictate – the business processes of an organisation. This enables service management good practice to be applied to customers' specific business environments to drive service quality as experienced by the customer, rather than as measured by the supplier.

Customer needs

Today’s businesses face numerous challenges: you need to be globally connected, provide your customers with consistent services, provide your own people with the infrastructure to enable them to work effectively, and stay compliant with increasing regulations. To do this, you need to ensure that your ICT infrastructure and the rest of the business remain aligned.

Converged Service Management from BT

BT can offer ITIL-based solutions to help our customer face the business challenges outlined above. If needed, we can provide independent certification of these good practice capabilities and governance through the ISO20000 standard.

We will work in partnership with you and your other suppliers to implement ITIL good practice processes to support and improve your ICT infrastructure to enable you to focus on what you do best. This provides numerous benefits, such as:

• Increased alignment of your ICT infrastructure to business needs through adoption of the ITIL framework
• Standard language and framework for service management in your extended enterprise
• More efficient use of your ICT infrastructure through standardised ITIL process management
• Integration of security into your ICT infrastructure through our security practice and alignment with ISO270000

Why BT

• We have over 20 years of experience serving global customers.
• We have extensive experience in ITIL and ISO20000, beginning with ITIL implementation in our UK National Health Service (NHS) contract in 2002.
• Our worldwide service presence and local reach mean we can meet your requirements wherever you do business and whenever you need support, 24 hours a day 365 days a year.

Customer satisfaction

Customer feedback drives our business priorities. BT has established a comprehensive customer satisfaction programme to focus on the areas that matter to you, creating a customer centric approach to everything we do.

Every year, we survey over 32,700 customers worldwide. We act on the results and the actions taken are closely monitored by senior management through a monthly forum.

Target based Service Level Agreements

To protect your business, BT has a cross-portfolio Service Level Agreement – covering service delivery, availability and restoration by site. It gives you the opportunity to benefit from a consistent and complete, end to end offer.

• BT understands that each customer solution is unique and whilst some sites are key to their operations, others are less critical.
• Through target based SLAs, BT is able to offer a solution, designed to specific configurations, which will yield the required target availability at a given site.
• Target based SLAs offer the opportunity to design a flexible, responsive SLA according to a customers business needs.
• Coupled with an aggressive incremental service credit plan, target based SLAs offer peace of mind and assurance that BT will strive to deliver the performance levels you expect.

What do BT SLAs cover?

BT's SLAs cover the three primary service dependencies:

• Service Delivery
  All service components delivered on an agreed date - where we fail, a service credit will apply
• Service Assurance and Availability
  Configuration based site targets designed for optimum availability and restorability
• Network Performance (for MPLS and Internet Access Service only)
  BT's Service Level Agreement also includes network performance targets for RTD, packet delivery and jitter for MPLS and Internet Access Service.