Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 audio
BT is one of the best known businesses in the UK, for better or worse. Whether you’re a paying customer for one of its services or not, almost everyone in the UK has interacted with BT at some point in their lives. As Lee Frankham, Digital Product Director at BT Group, notes:
We're a very big business, but a very old business, £20 billion market cap. The consumer side of the business i across three primary channels, digital, which I look after as the product director for digital, and all the design teams as well. We have a big retail estate of 500 stores now, and a big call center business as well, serving predominantly telco at the moment.
The biggest network in the ground is BT, obviously, and EE is the biggest mobile network in the UK. So looking after both of those things and trying to bring the two products together across across our customer base is a huge task. Underneath the the facade, we've got a very complex IT structure with multiple stacks and loads of legacy, from Orange to T-Mobile to even BT Cellnet for anyone that's old enough and been around long enough. So, lots of complexity.
Add to this complexity a policy reversal on the part of the Group about how it wanted to interact with its customers and prospects, from getting on the phone to getting online. Frankham explains:
We haven't quite made the shift yet, but we've definitely been on a journey of trying to educate our customers and change a behavior that we've installed in the customer base over many, many years. We've taught the entire UK public to call up, and you'll get the best deal. You'll get a different level of service, you'll get different experiences if you ring up. You get different again, if you go into a store and actually digital is the last place that you should ever interact with any sort of telco business, because it's a storefront, a price setting environment.
We've had to change that entire strategy over the last, five years with ‘anger’, to really get our customers to interact digitally, and to do that, we've had to change all the experiences, change the way that the business thinks about the digital landscape, the infrastructure, how we show up in terms of pricing and offers for our customers, and ensure that we don't treat the channels very differently.
Journey
It’s a journey that’s still underway, he admits:
I wouldn't say we're in an omni-channel done state yet, but I don't think anybody is. People that claim that they're finished and are omni, [but] no-one is yet. I don't believe that anybody is yet. Everyone's got a lot of sticky tape holding it all together at the moment, but we're definitely on that journey at the moment.
And the direction of travel is clear:
It's super important we get there in BT and EE and Plusnet, to make sure that our customers can interact with us in the way that they want to. Historically, we've gone on this sort of mission where we have been saying,'The reason we're doing it is because it's cheaper'. But we've seen some stats, and it’s not entirely true anymore.
But the real reason for doing it is that our customer base is telling us more and more that [when] they want to transact with us, over 50% of them are saying, 'Actually, I'd rather not call up. I'd rather not sit on the phone with a dial tone and wait. I would actually rather do it [digitally], but you're not making it easy for us to do so’.
Making this digital-first shift does bring about fresh challenges. Frankham explains:
When you think about our business, it's a huge, great business with 110,000 employees [and] huge departments - brand, marketing, commercial service, etc - and everybody hypothesize why things aren't properly translating with the customer. If something's not converting on one of the websites, brand will say it's pricing, pricing says it's brand, various different things.
To get to the bottom of this, BT Group uses analytics tech from Contentsquare to drill down into what the real rationale as to why people were transacting in call centers and in digital differently to what the hypotheses were and what the people's experience was. The results were telling, says Frankham:
One of the things that was really showing up was that we thought, and it sounds obvious now, that showing customers every possible option of price points - bearing in mind, our customers are not just buying a product, they're buying contracts,, finance agreements, etc - but showing up all of these different options, different deals, - ‘If you take this, you get that’ - actually, with the paradox of choice, people were getting so confused that they weren't transacting at all.
We were watching people, and it was quite humbling. I have to say, seeing customers go into the website, click on a PDP (Product Detail Page), click on another one, and click back, because they can't quite understand the difference. We understand it in the industry, but it's not quite making sense [to the customer]. Really [this is] highlighting the fact that showing lots of things is not the right way to go, making it too hard for the customer.
Fixing
BT was able to use that information to convince parts of the business of the need to introduce fixes:
The data analytics team was able to really bring this to life for our brand and marketing team and say, ‘Look, this just isn't right. It's not working. You can see it here real customers, not just in a lab looking at scenarios. This is not working'. And overall, we managed to change the fact that we were displaying, I think, something like 26 product carts to the customers down to a maximum of five. That fundamentally changed the way that we convert on the website, how people interact with us, how people fully understand the offers in front of them.
All of this has meant parts of the business having to adjust to new realities, he notes:
It's a big old shift for our business to make. I don't believe hand on heart, we'd have made that decision without being able to show real customers interacting that way.
We've had a lot of examples where, historically, our branding team are very brand-focused, shall we say, and that would also be described as quite ‘fluffy’ from the commercial team. Everyone would have their rationale between why [something] should be on the website, and what's more important, brand versus commercial outcomes. Without tools like Contentsquare, we were unable to drill down to whether people are actually taking note of certain things. Actually, in both scenarios, we both pleased teams and upset teams, but we were able to make data-led decisions off the back of it.
Our Head of Data Analytics spent a lot of time getting rid of a lot of old tools. You do have to wean people off old stuff. and not spoon fed everybody all the data from that moment onwards. So we used to pump out lots and lots of reports all the time. But rather than do that, [we wanted to] educate everyone to be able to go and select information, look at their own products.
Today, the product teams are enabled with Contentsquare to be able to look at how things perform:
Whenever we go to the board meetings or the monthly or quarterly reviews etc, the data we use is purely sourced from Contentsquare and other tools, but absolutely when we're showing live customer experiences we use that.
We were obsessed with doing lab type tests, where you get 20 customers in a room and test a new product. That was very sanitized. They'd look at this particular thing, and you pretty much got the answer you always wanted. Funny how that happens? Let's do little less of that, and let's do some real customer insight AB testing and be able to prove out that we can quickly learn, quickly change, adapt and utilize the tool to be able to really tell us what the customers are thinking.
The positive results of the digital journey to date has encouraged corporate mind-shift, concludes Frankham, with the expectation of more to come:
Showing the exec [this], showing different parts of our organization as well, has really enabled buy-in across the whole business. It's just showing how it can change the way that people are thinking using data and how they can self-serve and really see how their products are coming to life for the customer. We've really had to wean the business off experience-led decision making, or gut-led decision-making. And it's really showing what data-led decision-making can do.
With the new tools that come in, it just becomes more intuitive, and more people then use them, because it becomes more natural, more part of their day-to-day life. So the more people do that, the more people will tweak and change and develop, and things will just get changed for the customer benefit a lot quicker. And the commercial outcomes will be there as well.