BT Contact: Customer Service Fit For The "Omnichannel Generation"

      BT Contact: Customer Service Fit For The "Omnichannel Generation"

BT Contact innovates to help organizations address changing customer
expectations driven by digital communication channels such as social media,
webchat and video

PR Newswire

IRVING, Texas, Jan. 31, 2013

IRVING, Texas, Jan. 31, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- BT today announced innovative new
capabilities for its BT Contact portfolio, designed to make organizations
easier to do business with, while removing costs and complexity from their
contact center operations and enabling "omnichannel" customer service.

Those innovations, including the latest evolution of  BT's cloud-based contact
center solutions, will help organizations keep ahead of trends in
"omnichannel" customer service — customer service delivered over multiple
channels but connected together within the organization to provide a seamless
customer experience, regardless of channel used. The growth in omnichannel
service has been driven by demand for simpler and more consistent interactions
via online, social media and video channels.

The innovations to the BT Contact portfolio include technologies from BT's key
partners and also feature products and services optimized for mid-market
organizations with contact centers of between 100-1000 seats — the fastest
growing contact center market. The BT Contact solutions are designed to
provide the same sophistication as large contact center deployments but
packaged in a way to avoid expensive bespoke developments. 

The updated BT Contact portfolio now includes:

  o BT Inbound Contact: harnessing the reach and reliability of BT's global
    voice network and employing its intelligence to route and queue calls all
    around the world. BT Inbound Contact allows organizations to provide a
    uniform service across all contact centers, providing callers, regardless
    of geographical location, with the same range of access numbers and
    routing plans. This helps international organizations present themselves
    as local operators and allows them to connect customers and agents across
    multiple contact centers, minimizing the need for investments in call
    routing technologies.  As part of the enhancements announced today, BT
    Inbound Contact is being rolled out to eight new countries throughout the
    next 12 months including Chile, Colombia, Turkey, Thailand, Indonesia,
    Costa Rica, Venezuela and Romania offering organizations cost savings on
    average of 30% by avoiding the use for international numbers, which incur
    higher access charges for organizations and are more expensive for
    customers to call.
  o BT Auto Contact is an automated system that allows customers to use
    self-service technology to deal with simple, routine queries in a
    convenient manner. It allows organizations to focus resources on managing
    more complex customer enquiries, offering cost savings in agents' time of
    up to 90 per cent.  BT is expanding its cloud-based self service solutions
    to the US and Latin America, in addition to existing capabilities in
    Europe and Asia-Pacific.
  o BT Cloud Contact enables agents to work from any location, meaning experts
    are available 'on demand' regardless of where or how the customer enquiry
    is made.  Customers get consistently higher service and enterprises can
    make the most of the skills and expertise spread throughout their
    organization. BT Cloud Contact's technology allows organizations to flex
    capacity in line with operational needs and is available as a
    "pay-as-you-go" service. BT Cloud Contact will benefit from new features
    such as "desktop connectors", allowing organizations to incorporate more
    information on agents' desktop to help better serve customers.  BT is also
    introducing Cisco SocialMiner to provide social media tools for agents
    using BT Cloud Contact.  This allows cloud-based scanning and monitoring
    of social media networks, incorporating those into normal contact center
    operations to help provide a fully omnichannel experience. Relevant social
    media posts can then be presented to agents as a live feed which they can
    then choose to action.
  o BT Onsite Contact: building on the success of BT Cloud Contact, BT Onsite
    contact  has been enhanced for mid-market organizations, allowing for
    transparent capture and routing of customer requests, regardless of
    channel of contact. 
  o BT Optimize Contact: launched as a cloud service from £30 per user per
    month, BT Optimize Contact is a suite of optimization tools that gives
    deeper insight into contact center operations, from who is making contact,
    when and how,  to staffing and service levels, helping organizations
    maximize efficiencies and improve customer service.  This new BT
    capability is being delivered in a way that allows organizations to flex
    up and down in line with operational needs.

Andrew Small, Vice President BT Contact in BT Global Services, said: "BT
Contact continues to innovate, helping organizations create an 'omnichannel'
approach to customer service. Our latest enhancements to the portfolio empower
organizations of all sizes to provide world-class care to their customers. It
gives agents a much broader access to the information needed to manage
customers' interactions regardless of channel used. And it provides
organizations with the ability to add new communication channels without
significantly increasing complexity or cost.    

"BT manages 10 billion minutes per year of inbound voice calls to our
enterprise customers' contact centers.  We understand voice; we understand
contact centers and we're enabling new online channels such as social media. 
This makes us the partner of choice to help organizations deliver an
outstanding omnichannel customer experience."

The BT Contact portfolio harnesses the latest technologies from Cisco, Avaya
and Genesys and is complemented by BT Advise Contact: a consultancy service
drawing on BT's strong design and integration skills with experience across
multiple vendors, multiple channels and multiple technologies.

Details on the BT Contact portfolio are available at www.bt.com/btcontact

About BT
BT is one of the world's leading providers of communications services and
solutions, serving customers in more than 170 countries.  Its principal
activities include the provision of networked IT services globally; local,
national and international telecommunications services to its customers for
use at home, at work and on the move; broadband and internet products and
services and converged fixed/mobile products and services.  BT consists
principally of four lines of business: BT Global Services, BT Retail, BT
Wholesale and Openreach.

In the year ended 31 March 2012, BT Group's revenue was £18,897m with profit
before taxation of £2,445m.

British Telecommunications plc (BT) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of BT Group
plc and encompasses virtually all businesses and assets of the BT Group.  BT
Group plc is listed on stock exchanges in London and New York. 

For more information, visit www.btplc.com.

 

SOURCE BT

Website: http://www.btplc.com
Contact: For more information about this release, please contact Kris
Kozamchak, Head of PR and Corporate Relations U. S., at + 1 972 310 9055 or
kris.kozamchak@bt.com. All news releases can be accessed at our web sites:
http://www.globalservices.bt.com/us/en/news and http://www.btplc.com/news