Meet the people: the Industry Engagement Team

You might speak to them by phone or contact them by email. But exactly who are the BT Wholesale people who deliver the products, services, programmes and ideas to help you meet your customers' needs and grow your business?

Today The Loop introduces you to Helen Nurse and Felicity Webster from the Industry Engagement Team.

The Loop: “What does Industry Engagement do?”

Helen Nurse: “We’re responsible for talking to and consulting with customers and other stakeholders to get their views and input in three key areas: the development of BT’s 21^st Century Network (21CN); BT Wholesale’s product innovation and development programme; and Customer Experience initiatives across our business. We’re the constant link between industry and BT Wholesale: we try to be their champions and their voice within the organisation, if you like.”

The Loop: “So how does it work?”

Helen: "We have three teams – but obviously with some overlap. There’s Consult21, Customer Experience and Wholesale Futures. I’m involved in the first two. As most readers will know, Consult21 is the 21CN consultation programme. And my job here is all about making sure that customers are kept aware and up to date with what’s happening in 21CN and encouraging them to get involved so that they can influence the direction it takes.”

Felicity Webster: "And I work in Wholesale Futures – which is where we make sure all our 21CN portfolio products and other new products not only have the right features but are also delivered and supported in the right way to tick all the boxes for our customers. And that’s both in business case terms and in customer experience terms.”

The Loop: “So how do you find out what’s on that checklist?”

Felicity: "By meeting and talking to customers. We’re keen to involve everyone at every step of the way and in every aspect of product development: technical, commercial, systems and processes. So we run workshops. We hold webcalls. We go along to things like the ISP Forum. And we work closely with our account team colleagues to hear what customers are saying.”

Helen: “And in Consult21 getting together face to face is vital too. We’ve been holding Working Group meetings for five years – bringing together the relevant experts from our customers and from different parts of BT to discuss, develop and progress specific aspects of 21CN and its products. We have special update events from time to time – like the one at the BT Tower last November for those with end-user customers in South Wales. Plus there are quarterly 21CN webcalls – which customers find are a very quick way catch up with what’s new.”

The Loop: “And what are the benefits of taking this collaborative approach? Can we have a couple of live examples?”

Felicity: “Customers have been indicating that one addition they’d really welcome to BT Wholesale Ethernet is a 10GB Etherway service. The customer demand for this service and the relative priority of this development had been unclear though and was therefore not something that we were aiming to progress until next year. However, as a result of getting a number of customers together at a recent forum, we were able to discuss this and establish that in fact, they’d like us to make it the No. 1 priority on our product development roadmap! So we’re planning to hold a workshop on 2 February 2010 to share the different technical design options and get consensus on what the best solution is to meet the varying customer requirements. By taking this approach we’re potentially accelerating the feasibility and design process and if successful will result in this development being delivered much earlier than originally planned.

Another example is the fibre-based Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC) variant that we launched on 20 January 2010. Over the last six months, I’ve been working with my product line colleagues and our customer triallists to shape the product’s design and help set its price points, as well as finding out what their end-customers think of the service and how they’re using it. This has helped us to better understand what strategic plans they have for selling it – and how we can help them put them into action.”

GET MORE >

Read more about the launch of our fibre-based broadband services in this issue here.

Listen in to the news with a 21CN quarterly webcall. Catch the latest one here, and see the associated PowerPoint here.

Look out for more 'Meet the people' features in future issues of The Loop – and please tell us who you'd like us to profile next by contacting Sarah Tomlinson: sarah.tomlinson@bt.com