BT Pledges to Bring Majority of Customer Support Back into the UK

BT has today promised to answer “more than” 80% of its customers’ calls in the United Kingdom by the end of 2016 and they plan to go further in the future, which could be a reflection of how it’s no longer as costly to run a UK call centre as it once was and consumers dislike distant outsourcing.

As part of this commitment BT has created more than 1,000 new UK jobs and plans to create hundreds of other customer call centre positions over the next year, although it usually takes more than the mere hiring of additional staff in order to improve support quality and as such BT are also making some other changes.

The operator will provide “dedicated relationship managers” to support customers with “complex issues” (this almost sounds a bit like family counselling) and they’ll also offer more online support via their My BT customer service app for smartphones and tablets.

John Petter, CEO of BT Consumer, said:

“Our customers have told us that they would prefer to speak to a contact centre in the UK when they call us.

When we launched BT Mobile earlier this year we located customer service in the UK and our customers have valued that. We think doing this for our other products is one way in which we can boost the service that we offer customers.

This move will secure thousands of existing UK jobs and create new UK jobs.

Our offshore partners have provided a good level of service for our customers and we will still have offshore partners to help us to deliver various campaigns and services.

However, we believe that now is the right time to commit more investment to the UK and that this is something that customers will appreciate.”

However not all of BT’s jobs will be coming back to UK shores and they’ll continue to “outsource back office work and functions that do not involve taking customers’ calls offshore“. The proof, as always, will be in the pudding.. or calling. Big ISPs often tend to rely on a very “scripted” approach to support provision and we suspect that won’t change much.