Last year BT pledged to answer “more than” 80% of its customers’ calls in the United Kingdom by the end of 2016 (here) and today they’ve moved forward with that commitment by announcing the creation of 1,000 permanent UK jobs, which reflect “frontline roles in customer care” to be filled by April 2017.
Apparently BT’s Consumer division has already filled an extra 1,000 roles in its UK contact centres to “enable it to service more of its consumer customers in the UK” and the latest announcement adds another 1,000 on top of that. The new jobs will be spread across the country, although it’s already known that 100 customers service roles will be created in their Swansea department. Extra apprentices and graduates will also be included.
The press release further states that some of the latest batch of permanent jobs will be taken by the “best agency advisors“, who currently carry out BT work via Manpower.
Libby Barr, BT Consumers MD of Customer Care, said:
“We announced in September 2015 that BT Consumer is going to answer more than 80 per cent of its customers’ calls in the UK by the end of 2016 and this means we need more people in our UK contact centres.
We will have created 2,000 permanent UK jobs by the end of this process, including agency transfers, which is a fantastic boost for the UK economy and many regions where we are already a significant employer.
Our advisors have recently agreed to support our investment back in the UK by voting to adopt a new work pattern to ensure we have more people available to answer calls in the UK at weekends and in the evenings. This demonstrates the commitment from everyone at BT to work together to improve customer service and to make things easy for our customers.”
It’s fair to say that customer service hasn’t always been BT’s strong point, with many subscribers finding the experience to be problematic and this tends to show via Ofcom’s complaint reports (here) and other studies. A lot of the blame for this is often put at the feet of outsourced call centres and BT hopes to rectify this by bringing related jobs back into the UK.
At present BT claims to be spending “hundreds of millions of pounds” each year on service, while the latest improvements reflect an additional spend of £80m over the next two years to boost performance. Naturally we’ll be keeping a close eye on BT to see if the improvements are reflected in consumer feedback.
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