Meet The People: Business Improvement 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 we meet Gervaise White, a Business Improvement Manager.

The Loop: “What does Business Improvement do?”

Gervaise White: “We shadow BT Wholesale’s interactions with customers: their customer experience. We identify where there’s room for improvement and report our findings to colleagues in the relevant teams and work with them to deliver the changes as priority projects. We drive the business to sponsor change on behalf of customers both on a localised level and across the business.”

The Loop: “So how do you find out what customers think and want?”

Gervaise: "The main way is our monthly customer satisfaction surveys. Independent market researchers do these for us by phone by interviewing customers chosen from the names registered on our Siebel system. An interview takes no more than 20 minutes and it’s a great opportunity for customers to tell us what they like – and what we could do better.”

The Loop: “And how else do you get their views?”

Gervaise: "Meeting face to face is very important. We get together regularly with colleagues – such as in account management and billing – to hear what customers are saying. We also visit customers to get feedback direct. And once a year our market researchers undertake executive surveys by meeting and getting the views of customers’ senior people. We’ve recently expanded these to include reseller companies. That’s one of the groups I’m personally responsible for.”

The Loop: “Next month a new survey year starts. Will we see any changes?”

Gervaise: "Yes – and they’re mainly the result of a customer focus group we held last December: the first of its kind to look specifically at the customer satisfaction survey programme. We wanted a better idea of how well the surveys themselves are working for customers in terms of the questions we ask, who we ask and how we report back progress: what we call ‘You said, we did’. So from April we’re making a number of changes.”

The Loop: “Can you give us some examples?”

Gervaise: “Invitations to take part will become more personalised. New questions will ask not just what customers feel about systems and processes but also about their strategic relationship with us. We also plan to send out the question sets in advance so our interviewees have more time to think about what they want to tell us. And to improve communications, we’re in the process of setting up new information sources, such as posting regular updates on business improvements at our new Roadmaps site and tailored CE plans per customer. So when we next ask customers ‘Do you know what’s changed? Have you noticed a difference?’, we can be sure they’ll say ‘Yes’.”

GET MORE >

Working in a billing role? We’ll soon be starting our billing customer satisfaction surveys for 2010-11 – as you can read in this issue here.

Who would you like us to profile next? Contact Sarah Tomlinson – sarah.tomlinson@bt.com – with your requests.