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: