BT Group – Customer Service framework

Operating in more than 170 countries, BT is one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services. Its main activities include networked IT services, local, national and international telecommunications services, and higher value broadband and internet products and services. BT Group employs 96,000 staff in the UK.

As part of BT Group’s aspiration to be 'the number one choice for customer service', it was crucial to demonstrate that it has a professional workforce who can be trusted to deliver excellent service consistently to its customers.

To achieve this level of professionalism and customer satisfaction, one area of the BT Group wanted to up-skill and re-skill its existing staff. It also wanted to give its staff better opportunities for job satisfaction and future development.

It was crucial for BT to work in partnership with an educational services provider that could be flexible; one that understood the needs of large employers in the telecommunications sector.

The ability of the provider to support BT throughout the training and assessment process was an important consideration, as was measuring the business impact from this initiative.

Pearson Work Based Learning worked with BT to review the current training programmes delivered to staff and map these to nationally recognised qualifications including BTECs, key and core skills, SVQs and NVQs. These qualifications form Apprenticeship programmes. To date almost 8,000 employees in BT contact centres have achieved, or are registered onto, a BTEC Apprenticeship programme.

Given that BT is a UK employer, it was a key advantage that Pearson Work Based Learning could support delivery across the whole of the UK.

Given the rapidly changing telecoms environment, BT saw great value in offering both technical training and training in English, maths and ICT skills.

BT also provides leadership programmes for all managers in its contact centre organisation. These too have been mapped to the requirements of the Apprenticeship, ensuring that there is a common UK measure of managers' knowledge, understanding and competence.

BT has seen considerable benefits since incorporating Pearson Work Based Learning’s qualifications within its approach to learning and development.

Staff are remaining with BT longer than previously, which substantially reduces the cost of hiring replacements, improves morale and provides a talent pool to support succession planning.

Andy Palmer, Head of Skills for the BT Group, reflected on the impact on employees: "The success of the programme is well reflected in our 92% achievement rate. We’ve found our staff are more engaged in their work, and have seen an increase in staff motivation and satisfaction. This increases our customer satisfaction, because our customers are engaging with a professional workforce, which is important to them."

Mr Palmer was also impressed with the level of support from Pearson Work Based Learning: "The support has been exceptional – they have provided us with a complete end-to-end experience. They are always very responsive to our needs and very flexible to provide us with information we need, when we need it.

"Pearson provide regular updates on funding, policy and changes in government. More importantly, they understand the detail for each change, and can support and talk us through any changes to ensure we've implemented them into BT.

"Work-based learning is absolutely critical to BT. Pearson provide invaluable input, advice and guidance to our learning and development programmes, and we recommend the use of Edexcel qualifications to other companies."