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BT Group, the leading communications service provider in the UK, relies on Amdocs Document Designer to reduce its costs and improve customer communication with its 21 million residential and business customers.
David Graystone, Head Of Billing Development, BT, speaks out about Amdocs’ work with BT:
COMMUNICATING THE BT BRAND
In the consumer market, our prime method of communication with the customer is the bill. We send our customers four bills a year and that makes up more than 50% of our annual communication to our customers. So to us, the supply of a good bill to the customer is key, and we look to Amdocs to provide that capability.
The BT brand is very important to us. We are a widely recognized and trusted brand, and we've used the Amdocs Document Designer since 2001 to exploit that link to our customers. We've achieved significant environmental benefits, given customers specific billing that meets their needs and shared with our customers that we have reduced overall costs.
Amdocs was very sensitive to our overall brand image and helped deliver that message to the customer. Our brand has been reinforced by building the new platform and delivering these new bills to the customer. We have particularly reinforced trustworthiness and openness. In all the surveys we do with our customers, those are key brand elements that are very much appreciated.
FLEXIBILITY FOR RAPID TIME TO MARKET
Flexibility is the key benefit to our business. We have 370 separate bill formats. Amdocs Document Designer has the flexibility and functionality to support them all.
Amdocs Document Designer provides us with the facility to change the bill quickly in response to our customers' needs and to provide our customers with key messages. In the old days, we could only change our bill about once every two or three years. Now we can change it every six to eight weeks, which is fantastic. Billing always used to hold us up, but now we can launch new products quickly into the market, giving us a significant competitive advantage. We launched a very complex broadband product and, with Amdocs Document Designer, we have been able to describe that service and the billing for it in a way that customers can understand.
SCALABILITY
When we first bought the Amdocs Document Designer, our biggest concern was scalability.We found that scalability wasn't a problem at all, and, in fact, all our bill runs fit easily within the schedule.
We produce 126 million bills in a year – that is approximately 500,000 bills each night.We added in bill reminders because we knew the Document Designer could handle it. Altogether, Document Designer supports 165 million mailed items each year.
PROVEN ROI AND COST SAVINGS
We targeted that we get full return and we managed to achieve that.We've saved an appreciable amount of money in our print and dispatch as a result of reducing the average bill size and our postage costs. We've reduced our overall marketing spend by providing marketing messages on the bill. Altogether, we have an annual savings of about £8 million ($13 million). We've continued to achieve this annual savings in subsequent years, and we've made significantly more savings on top, by re-engineering the bill to save even more money. We've saved costs equivalent to 4% of our total billing cost by using the platform, and we're expecting to save another 2% to 3% on top of that. In addition, we see a substantial reduction in the number of customer queries. In light of all the other changes, we haven't been able to measure it on an ongoing basis. We think it may be another £1 to £2 million saved each year.
IMPROVED CUSTOMER COMMUNICATIONS AND CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
We've met customer needs by reducing bill size and length. Now we can send a bill to the customer with the right length and level of detail, and that's key, because it's improved our customer satisfaction.
If our customers are satisfied with the bill, then they are also satisfied with the overall performance of BT. The key fact about bill satisfaction is actually value for money. So if we can use the bill as a vehicle to communicate value for money, as much as communicate the services and products we offer, then we gain satisfaction overall. We shared the details of our customer satisfaction research with Amdocs, and they built that into the design. Document Designer is certainly helping us get across the value for money message. By using the Amdocs product, we changed the bill to improve customer satisfaction.
The bill provides the customer with lots of information: details of all services, call usage details and a list of all their contacts with us. We produced a three-tier structure on our bill for the invoice, summary and detail levels. We've done a message cascade so there is a message flow through the bill. We use product-specific messaging and top-level segmentation based on the nature of the customer. We've provided a more condensed way of supplying bill information in a shorter number of pages. We've saved about 150 to 200 million pages of print each year.
AMDOCS' CAN-DO ATTITUDE – RELIABLE PARTNER THAT DELIVERS
We liked the Amdocs 'can-do' attitude. Amdocs and BT worked very closely. The teamwork was magnificent. The whole project was deployed very quickly considering the scale of the task. That was a major achievement. Working closely with Amdocs as the supplier, you can get real value out of the relationship and deliver the full benefits of the project.
I believe that this Amdocs implementation was one of the best implementations we've had, certainly I've had in my career. It met target time, and personal relationships were excellent. They're still excellent today.
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