BT Group and ServiceNow have announced an expanded strategic relationship to improve customer and employee experiences.
The multi-year agreement will extend ServiceNow service management capabilities to all BT Group units to drive savings, efficiency and improved customer experiences.
BT Group will also use ServiceNow Service Bridge for a seamless, automated connection between BT and their customers, and plans to pilot ServiceNow’s Now Assist for Telecom Service Management (TSM) to power Generative AI capabilities for internal and customer-facing teams.
Having successfully consolidated legacy service management platforms for BT Group’s Digital unit onto the single ServiceNow platform in 2022, the company is rolling out ServiceNow’s service management solutions across its organisation.
A key application within the service management platform is ServiceNow Service Bridge, which seamlessly connects BT Group and their enterprise customers, making it easy to automate and complete tasks like orders, support and service. Service Bridge will connect previously isolated processes into a single digital workflow, allowing customers to pass requests onto BT’s service team directly from within their own ServiceNow environments.
BT is also one of the first customers to pilotNow Assist for TSM and benefit from ServiceNow’s Generative AI capabilities. In the initial roll out to 300 agents, Now Assist demonstrated meaningful results by improving agent responsiveness and driving better experiences for BT Group’s agents and customers. For example, case summarisation reduces the time it takes agents to generate case activity summaries by 55% and creates a better agent handoff experience by reducing the time it takes to review complex case notes, also by 55%. By reducing overall handling time, Now Assist is helping BT Group improve its mean time to resolve by a third.
Hena Jalil, Managing Director, Business CIO at BT Group, said: “Reimagining how we deliver service management requires a platform first approach, building stronger foundations for us to do things faster and smarter. Our approach, powered by ServiceNow and enhanced with AI, will transform customer experience at BT Group, unlocking value at every stage of the journey. In short, it is further evidence to customers that we’ve got their back.”
We asked Hena Jalil, Managing Director, Business CIO at BT Group, further questions to find out more.
How has the expanded strategic relationship between BT Group and ServiceNow improved customer and employee experiences so far, and what specific metrics demonstrate these improvements?
Our strategic relationship with ServiceNow has unlocked a wide range of benefits for both our service agents and our customers.
A key application within the ServiceNow platform is Service Bridge which allows our customer-facing teams to be seamlessly connected with our enterprise customers. This connection allows us to automate and easier complete tasks such as orders, service and support – greatly streamlining our service agents’ workflows and allowing them to spend more time on providing excellent customer service.
We are also one of the first customers to pilot Now Assist for TSM and benefit from ServiceNow’s Generative AI capabilities. This solution has helped to reduce the time it takes for agents to generate case activity summaries by 55% and has streamlined the agent handoff process by reducing the time it takes to review complex case notes, also by 55%.
By connecting previously isolated processes into one digital workflow, the Service Bridge platform allows customers to pass requests onto our service teams directly from their own ServiceNow environments. This streamlines the support process and removes unnecessary friction that might cause frustration. As a result of Now Assist capabilities the average time to resolve cases has fallen by 35%, further simplifying customer experience.
Can you elaborate on how ServiceNow Service Bridge will streamline operations between BT Group and their enterprise customers, and what immediate benefits you expect from this integration?
To help support enterprises through every stage of their customer journey, the Service Bridge platform leverages a configuration-based approach which allows us to onboard our customers utilising ServiceNow quicker and efficiently.
This integration removes the need to switch between different systems and portals and allows us to publish and refresh our service catalogue much faster, enabling us to meet ever changing customer and market demands. Alongside these benefits, we can now deliver service advisories directly to our enterprise customers through proactive notifications to establish trust and strengthen customer relationships by keeping them in the loop.
What were the key challenges BT Group faced when consolidating legacy service management platforms onto the ServiceNow platform, and how were these challenges addressed?
One key challenge that we faced was around the quality of the case study output. Towards the start of our journey, our human agents were required to check the LLM-generated summary reports in a read-only view. However, as our service desk model is trained on anonymised data, our case study summaries have continued to improve over time, eliminating this problem altogether. This simultaneously improves both our customer service agents’ and customers’ experience as this will speed up the handover process and allow our agents to spend more time on value-adding tasks rather than routine tasks.
With the pilot of Now Assist for Telecom Service Management, what specific AI capabilities are being utilised, and how have these capabilities improved agent responsiveness and customer satisfaction?
At BT Group, we are leveraging Now Assist for Telecom Service Management to support our customer service agents with summarising customer conversations, case activities and work notes. This product leverages Generative AI to enhance our customer service agents’ productivity and efficiency, while simultaneously improving agent responsiveness and allowing them to provide exceptional customer experiences.
By leveraging Now Assist, we have been able to lower the time it takes to generate case studies by 55% and create a better handoff experience by reducing the time it takes to review case notes, also by 55%. This helps to ensure that our enterprise customers get the best support in the quickest time possible, and we have improved our mean case resolve time by a third so far.
How does BT Group plan to leverage Generative AI capabilities across other areas of the organisation, and what future initiatives are in place to further enhance service management and customer experience?
Another example of how we are using Generative AI at BT Group is our recent rollout of Amazon Q Developer, a Generative AI coding companion, to our engineers following a successful pilot.
The solution provides real time AI-powered code suggestions across 19 different coding languages and helps our software developers to code responsibly. Amazon Q Developer is currently providing an average of 15-20 code suggestions per active user per day, with engineers accepting on average 37% of code suggestions from the platform.
Over 300,000 lines of code have been generated so far, which has automated around 13% of time-consuming tasks, helping us to drive productivity and greatly simplify workflows to allow our developers to spend more time on higher value coding and delivering value for our customers.
What are the long-term goals for BT Group’s service management transformation, and how will the on-going partnership with ServiceNow contribute to achieving these objectives?
At BT Group, we are sharpening our focus to be better for our customers by accelerating the modernisation of our operations – and our relationship with ServiceNow plays a key role in this.
With ServiceNow’s support, BT Group have been able to move away from 125 different service management platforms, which incorporated 76 different services processes and 56 IT service management tools, into one single application. An integral part of our group-wide transformation, this has enabled us to digitalise our contact centre systems to provide better support to our customers, aligning with our cloud-first and AI-first strategy. As we expand our strategic relationship, we look forward to continuing to work alongside ServiceNow to improve customer and employee experiences.
