Interwoven, Inc., provider of enterprise content management (ECM) systems, announced that BT, one of Europe's leading providers of telecommunications services, has adopted Interwoven's ECM platform, closely integrated with BEA WebLogic Portal, as the new standard Web content management, digital asset management, and portal infrastructure for BT.com. The implementation will enable BT to serve all constituents, including customers, employees and suppliers, through a common platform that improves brand consistency and customer service, lowers transaction costs, and increases "Netcentricity," or the number of transactions carried out without the direct involvement of BT staff.
BT serves more than 20 million business and residential customers through lines of business including retail, wholesale, and global services. The scope and diversity of BT's business is reflected in its online presence, with 600 internal sites and 350 external sites, many of which sit under BT.com. In the past, the various sites of BT.com have been powered by a broad mix of content management and technology platforms, resulting in differences in look and feel, navigation and even the accuracy of their information -- a real problem, given BT.com's retail focus and frequent promotions. The reliance of business units on a segmented marketing organization to process content changes created frequent bottlenecks and made it hard to achieve the responsiveness demanded by the fast-moving telecommunications marketplace. The system then in use also lacked scalability and flexibility, and simply wasn't up to the task of supporting BT's business.
Said Bill James, eChannels director for BT Retail, "Our goal is to make it easier for our customers to do business with us online. By helping us transform BT.com into an integrated, automated and easy-to-use e-sales and e-service environment, Interwoven is enabling us to achieve excellent customer satisfaction results while reducing our transaction costs."
BT Standardizes on Integrated Platform
BT made the strategic decision to standardize BT.com on an integrated Interwoven-BEA platform that would enable it to serve all constituents, including customers, employees and suppliers, through a common Web content management infrastructure and series of highly-targeted, highly-relevant portals. Interwoven TeamSite Content Server software, closely integrated with BEA WebLogic Portal software, is now being implemented in stages throughout BT.com as the new standard platform for content creation, management and publishing. The switch to TeamSite for content management is allowing BT to shift from 100 percent centralized publishing to an 80 percent distributed model, in which business units are being given the ability to create their own content based on generic templates, then route these pages to a small content management team for expedited approval. Interwoven MediaBin Asset Server software will allow BT to create a centralized library of media assets -- including images, graphics and video -- to improve brand control, and enable brand consistency across all outbound communication including BT.com.
Underlying BT's Interwoven-BEA implementation is a concept called "Netcentricity." Simply put, this means making the right information available at the right time to the right people to provide a simple and consistent customer experience across all channels. By helping BT create and reuse content in a consistent way to anticipate and meet specific customer needs, Interwoven is helping BT improve its "Netcentricity Index," or the ratio of online transactions to total transactions. When customers do require online assistance, BT's contact center (call center) personnel will view the same pages as those accessible to customers, ensuring consistent information on pricing and promotions, as well as accessing additional content to aid the sales process. The improved efficiency of this "assisted self-service" sales process lowers transaction costs and helps wean customers from calling the contact center by highlighting to them the information available on BT.com. As a result, BT.com has already achieved a Netcentricity Index of 12 percent during FY 2003/4 resulting in 21.9M pounds Sterling (approximately 39 million U.S. dollars) in business efficiencies. The ongoing Netcentricity program is forecasted to provide an overall 28 percent index by FY 2006/7, which would result in a cumulative figure of 216M pounds in business efficiencies.
"BT is a long-time, strategic customer of BEA, across BT's wholesale, global services and retail businesses," said Rick Jackson, senior vice president, enterprise product marketing, BEA Systems. "We're committed to work with partners such as Interwoven to deliver solutions to customers so that they can rapidly develop lower cost, more agile portal applications."
"BT has just begun to uncover all the benefits of their Netcentricity program," says Kevin Hayden, vice president of corporate marketing for Interwoven. "We are very proud to have partnered with BEA to play our joint role in making the high returns of Netcentricity through the BT.com portal a reality."
With its BT.com sites standardized on the new portal, BT plans to migrate additional internal sites to the new Interwoven-BEA platform. Increasingly, BT will rely on Interwoven to control and drive content through all of its routes to market, starting with the Web sites, so that content for call centers and post-sales activities beyond BT.com.
About BT
BT is one of Europe's leading providers of telecommunications services. Its principal activities include local, national and international telecommunications services, higher-value broadband and Internet products and services, and IT solutions. In the UK, BT serves over 20 million business and residential customers with more than 29 million exchange lines, as well as
providing network services to other licensed operators. For more information, visit http://www.bt.com
