BT Bring 100% of Customer Service Calls Back to UK and Ireland
UK ISP BT has today confirmed the completion of their long-running strategy to end the outsourcing of customer support, which previously resulted in related calls being answered in India and the Philippines. Instead 100% of such calls will now be answered in the UK and Ireland, which has completed a year ahead of schedule.
The move has required BT to hire more than 2,000 new customer service agents. In addition, the broadband giant has also adopted Regional Call Routing, where they will answer customer calls in the customer service centre closest to them wherever possible. The operator can also now provide support for its products from inside of EE’s existing high street retail stores.
Originally BT expected to complete their onshoring work by the end of 2020, although they’ve now been able to do this almost a full year ahead of schedule.
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Marc Allera, CEO of BT Consumer, said:
“We know how important providing a personal, and local service is to our customers and today we’re celebrating delivering our commitment to answer all of our customer service calls in the UK and Ireland. We know our customers value speaking to someone on the other end of the phone who understands their issue, whether that’s about their products or the weather.
BT is already back on the high street and within 20 minutes’ drive of 95% of the UK population, and now as part of our ambition to be the best for service we’re now answering 100% of our customers’ calls in the UK and Ireland.”
A quick look at BT’s history of consumer complaints to Q3 2019 (Ofcom report) appears to show a general pattern of improvement over the past two years, with the biggest benefits being highlighted in their fixed broadband and phone business. However the operator still appears to have a problem where Pay TV is concerned as consumer gripes have recently been moving upwards again.
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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Does this cover their web support chat agents as well?
Does this cover the underlying network administration which actually causes most of the problems that the hapless customer facing agents are trying to solve.
You know your FTTC lift and shift gets ‘stuck’ and can only be sorted Indian time……..
British network admins are no better. It’s a shit network configured by idiots (Assuming British “Engineers”) to start with. Can’t blame that on the admins that work on it. it could be Indians or British It’s going to break.
What about the poor business customers
This move will most likely lower the blood pressure of many BT customers.
I don’t know about that… every time I’ve spoken to BT it’s been a native of this country and they have never failed to increase my blood pressure.
Maybe because of the accent? That’s what the regional routing is for.
I wish VM would do this also
About time BT stop sourcing their service to India. If BT bother to take their customers’ concern about scam calls from India where the scam callers soon call back with amazing amount of knowledgeable details regarding customers’ BT line faults. For a long time BT been digging their head in the sands making life miserable for customers. Read the chat lines on BT community forums
Watch BBC documentary form 2nd March 2020
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/stories-51660982/criminals-on-cctv-scammers-caught-red-handed
Criminals on CCTV: Scammers caught red-handed
Hundreds of thousands of people fall victim to scams in the UK every year.
Many are run from criminal call centres abroad, where teams of fraudsters operate around the clock.
One man in the UK, who goes by the name “Jim Browning”, decided to do something about it. He hacked into a call centre in India from where scammers target their victims.
Jim gained access to the recorded scam phone calls as well as CCTV footage exposing the scammers at work.