BT Hire 1000 New UK Customer Service Staff to Improve Support
Broadband ISP, phone, mobile and TV provider BT has announced that they’re hiring more than 1,000 permanent customer service staff, which will support their aspiration to answer 100% of customer calls in UK & Ireland based call centres by 2020 and to “provide the best customer service in the UK.”
The move, which is in addition to the 1,100 roles created across the UK in the last year, should however be taken in the context of the group’s recent decision to axe 13,000 jobs over the next three years (this will mainly hit back office and middle management roles).
In fairness those cuts were partly mitigated by their pledge to hire c.6,000 new employees to support network deployment and customer service, with today’s announcement appearing to form part of the latter. The job cuts were designed to achieve a year 3 cash cost reduction of £1.5bn with costs to achieve of £800 million and two year payback.
Marc Allera, CEO of BT Consumer, said:
“We’re continuing to invest across the UK to give our customers the best connections, service, and experiences. These new roles will provide better job security, and will mean our people can focus on putting our customers first and offer the best help and support, whether on the phone or online.”
No doubt some will find that pledge to provide the “best customer service in the UK” to be laughable given BT’s past reputation, although they’re clearly putting in some effort to rectify that perception. As usual time will tell how successful they are in this endeavour, but Ofcom’s recent consumer complaints report does appear to suggest that a positive trend is developing (here).
It’s worth noting that the new hires will all take permanent roles, as opposed to being contractors. All customer service staff currently on contract roles at BT Consumer’s sites across the UK will be offered these new roles.
The roles that BT is creating by location are:
| Minimum number of permanent roles created per BT call centre | |
| Aberdeen | 20 |
| Accrington | 45 |
| Blackburn | 80 |
| Canterbury | 120 |
| Doncaster | 65 |
| Dundee | 122 |
| Enniskillen | 40 |
| Glasgow | 50 |
| Lancaster | 20 |
| Leicester | 50 |
| Lincoln | 40 |
| Liverpool | 5 |
| Middlesbrough | 50 |
| Newcastle | 70 |
| Sandwell | 100 |
| South Shields | 80 |
| Stoke | 30 |
| Truro | 40 |
| Warrington | 20 |
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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Just before an already announced price rise! how quaint!
BT is one of the worst rated companies in the UK according to most review sites (e.g. Trustpilot etc). Therefore hiring new customer service staff is a good step in the right direction to improve this situation.
I work in one of those call centres. we’re always hiring new staff due to turnover in call centres and they are all being hired within the UK(the service staff) instead of abroad now to replace the agents overseas. All sales/retentions staff were always UK based. But no new actual staff are being hired, it’s simply a case where those who are on Manpower contracts are being moved over to permanent BT ones. Those people were temp contractors who remained on that rolling contract for potentially in some cases over 20 years because MP paid weekly as opposed to BT monthly. No new actual staff are being hired beyond the normal hiring numbers and channels at present.
Ryan you are somewhat mistaken. At the numbers printed above and possibly experience at your site it may well look like back filling, but I can assure you that there is huge growth in total numbers. Where I am based we went up from circa 80 Consumer staff to 400 in two years and there are more in training and more to follow. Rumour is we will recruit until the building is at capacity. The next site over from us has gone from two floors to three also and is starting more recruitment.
You dont go from 40 to 90 to 100% of calls being answered in the UK without hiring more staff in the UK.
NO he is right many start as only agency workers.
Continuity is the key, that customer service have the diagnostics to verify whether the line service is OK or not and more importantly that they are given the authority to resolve any contract issues. BT would benefit themselves from clearer package descriptions as many calls are due to resultant contract misunderstandings.
They had better change the way they train their customer service staff – in my life I have never delt with worse customer service.