1. BT
AMDOCS CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
Amdocs Bill Formatter helps us
reduce overall billing costs,
improving customer satisfaction,
communications and time to market.
DAVID GRAYSTONE
HEAD OF BILLING DEVELOPMENT
BT, UK
2. BT Group, the leading communications service provider in
the UK, relies on Amdocs Bill Formatter to reduce its costs
and improve customer communication with its 21 million
residential and business customers.
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 Bill Formatter 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 Bill Formatter has the flexibility and functionality
to support them all.
The Amdocs Bill Formatter 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 Bill Formatter, 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 Bill Formatter, 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 Bill
Formatter could handle it. Altogether, Bill Formatter 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. Bill Formatter 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, and it demonstrates that by working closely with
Amdocs as the supplier, you can get real value out of the
relationship and deliver the full benefits of the project. So I’ve got no
hesitation about thinking about using Amdocs in a wide range of
billing opportunities.
BT
AMDOCS CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
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