BT drives growth with AI-powered decisioning

The Business Issue

BT Business is the top provider of business communication services in the UK, serving over one million businesses. A subsidiary of BT Group, the company serves a diverse clientele – from corner-shop owners to multinational corporations.

In an evolving market where customer acquisition is dwindling, customer retention reigns supreme. BT Business recognized that its future hinged on retaining and delighting its existing customers, yet its extensive product portfolio that grew organically over the years posed a challenge.

With thousands of potential product permutations, considerations like eligibility, pricing, and customer needs became intricate puzzles. BT Business needed to balance ushering customers into a digital era and respecting their unique circumstances, whether operating a lift with an analog line or adhering to migration rules in competitive markets.

BT Business faced several challenges:

• Fragmented customer engagement: BT's existing customer engagement model was disjointed, with a lack of personalized interactions tailored to individual customer needs and potential.
• Limited customer insights: The company struggled with incomplete visibility into its customer base, inhibiting its ability to effectively target and tailor offers.
• Competitive market landscape: BT needed to differentiate itself in a competitive market where small players offered localized experiences and larger competitors matched BT's core offerings.
• Evolving technology needs: The rapid evolution of technology and changing customer expectations required BT to transition from legacy systems to advanced, integrated solutions.

The Solution

BT Business implemented Pega Customer Decision Hub™ to create an intelligent, always-learning, single source for all offers, actions, and insights for advisors and customers. The company recognized the need for robust data engineering, data science models, and rigorous measurement.

Central to BT Business’s success was its strategy of centering the agent in its transformation. The company knew it needed to understand how agents' conversations flow in order to integrate recommendations in the right place. By engaging internal business process experts to help identify and solve pain points, BT Business fostered adoption and buy-in. Now, Customer Decision Hub shows agents a customer’s propensity to churn and accept new offers and delivers next best action recommendations in real time.

Thanks to the omni-channel brain, agents are able to be consistent in the offers they provide to their customers and ensure communications are relevant, timely, and delivered on the proper channel. For example, if the company sent an outbound communication and a customer calls on the phone about that specific offer, the agent needs to know what was offered to that particular customer. With Customer Decision Hub, there’s a single source of information that provides a 360-degree customer interaction view.

The Results

• Increase in average revenue per transaction
• Decreased churn and losses
• Increased agent productivity
• Removed duplicate work
• Better visibility of impact of change
• Improved targeting and optimization on proactive communications
• Consistent deals available across inbound and outbound channels, meaning customers don’t see different deals depending on how they engage