BT Openreach Allow UK Customers to Feedback on Engineer Performance

Broadband and phone engineers working for BTOpenreach and external contractors, which maintain BT’s national UK telecoms infrastructure, will soon take part in a new trial that allows residential customers to give feedback on their performance after a visit. The results probably won’t be made available to the public.

Openreach are currently inviting ISPs to sign-up in order to take part in the trial, which will begin later this month and finish no later than the end of September 2014. The trial itself will be conducted in the North-West (Mersey) for contractors and Openreach’s engineers, as well as North/East London for Kelly Communications contractors and West-Central London for Quinn’s contractors.

As part of the trial engineers working on service provision jobs (e.g. new line installations [MPF, NGA managed install and WLR], but not repair works) will be required to leave a card with residential customers “containing the number of their controls as the point of contact in the event of any post-installation issues“. Openreach claims that the “objective is to help us to identify any differences experienced” between Openreach’s engineers and those of their contractors.

It’s easy to see why Openreach might desire to take a closer look at this area, especially given that some contractors have earned themselves somewhat of a questionable reputation among ISPs for the quality of their work (here). As the Business Development Manager for AAISP, Alex Bloor, said earlier this year, “[Kelly’s] have a dreadful reputation in the industry“.

Openreach Statement

“There are no SLAs on despatching engineers as the trial itself is to gather data and evidence on the types of faults and whether there any pattern to these, the frequency with which they are raised and the speed with which they are resolved by our engineering community. Any issues that are not able to be resolved with either a telephone conversation or a re-visit will also be logged as part of the trial.

At the end of the trial participating CPs will receive the feedback for their particular customers and we aim to share the high level results at the October SMF so that the wider CP community can decide post-trial upon the next steps.”

It’s perhaps no coincidence that this new measure surfaces so soon after Ofcom imposed new Quality of Service requirements upon Openreach (here) and this development should thus perhaps be seen in the wider context of those measures.

Many other industries and businesses also adopt a similar feedback orientated approach, which is often effective because giving users the ability to offer feedback can help to improve the quality of service delivery (i.e. encouraging engineers not to do shoddy work).

Hopefully Openreach’s trial won’t also make it easy for less honourable engineers to simply avoid leaving a card. In the future it would also be good to see a trial that looks more closely at non-MBORC related repair work, which might naturally focus more on Openreach’s own engineers. But generally this is a very good move by Openreach.