PegaWorld iNspire 2024: BT & EY: Re-Imagine the Base, Maximize Customer Lifetime Value & Deliver Personalization at Scale using AI & Decisioning

All right. Welcome. Welcome to the first of many breakout sessions here at PegaWorld this year. My name is John Alan. It's my pleasure to host this session this morning and to introduce our speakers for for this first breakout. Um, great to be able to introduce Simon from BT and Tim from our mutual partner EE to talk us through this first session. Uh, Simon leads based management and decisioning for BT business. And Tim is director of customer growth for EE. And they're going to take you through this morning a bit of a journey that we're on together to to kind of reimagine the way that they engage with their customers and drive drive business for for BT.

Um, structurally, we're going to have about 30 minutes of, of content, I think, and then there'll be an opportunity to, to ask questions towards the end. Um, so as we work through the content this morning, any questions that you, you know, you think you want to prepare for the end, then please make a note. And then there's a there's a couple of microphones and just in the aisles here to to come up and ask those questions. So I'll, I'll give you the opportunity for that, uh, when we get started. All right. So without any further ado, I'll, uh, hand over to Simon, who's going to start the session this morning. Thanks, Simon. Well, thank you all for for joining us today. So, as John mentioned, my name is Simon Matthews and I lead the customer base management and decisioning team within SMB.

Um, when I asked about what my role entailed, my boss simplified it very clearly. For me, you're responsible for the 1 million customers that we have on our base. You're responsible for ensuring that you maximize the value we have with them, and we drive really good customer experience. Tim. Yes. So sorry. Tim Hillier um, as John introduced, I'm a director of part of our own customer and growth practice within the UK, predominantly working within the TMT sector. Um, everything from a front office perspective. So marketing sales service with the ultimate aim of looking at how we support organizations increase and ultimately retain revenue.

So today we're going to talk to you about the large scale transformation program that we're driving within small and medium business. And the reason that we're doing that is there is a huge amount of value that we have within our base. And again, if we can just make a percentage point improvement, the entire business grows. And there's a there's a wealth of things we can go after. We're already doing some things well, but there is a vast amount we could do much better, which we're going to go into a bit more detail about that. So I'm going to give a bit of an overview of BT for those of you that don't know it and how SMB fits into that picture, and then talk a little bit about the journey that we're on, some of the things we've started to action, and we're about three months into the program now, and we've got some really good findings to talk to you about. Tim's then going to give a bit of a view of kind of other things we've done and where we're trying to head on the program. So for those of you who don't know, BT is the world's oldest telecommunications company. We have kind of three main units.

So we've got B2C, our consumer division which headlines the EE brand. We've got B2B or BT business. And over the past 12 months we've made a decision to refocus our brand strategy. So before both units had both the EE and the BT brands, we've made a decision to focus our E brand purely on consumer now and our BT brand purely on business, which gives us a really unique position to talk to our customers. The fact that BT really does mean business. We have the largest fiber network in the UK and also the largest 5G infrastructure, and we're the market leader in the UK. We have four customer facing units within BT business, so we've got small and medium, which is what we're going to talk to today. We've also got wholesale corporate and public sector and global global multinationals. And that's really to reflect the wide range of needs that businesses in the UK have.

We have really straightforward. I just want a broadband. I just want a mobile right up to the most complex SD-Wan networking solutions across the globe. Again, the diversity of our base. We'll talk a bit about that, but we have a independent plumber, a baker, right up to Coca-Cola's. The biggest organizations, um, are globally within our kind of portfolio. So how does SMB fit into the picture? So there are currently 5.5 million small businesses in the UK, and they spend around about 5 billion pounds per annum on telco solutions. We again, SMB is the market leader and we sell the core telco products.

So we've got networking, voice and mobile alongside some adjacencies around value added services and security. When we think about our customer base, we further segment that base into micro, small and medium. So micro 0 to 9, small 10 to 49, medium to 50 to 249. And again, that's to reflect the types of things that our customers want to buy from us, but also the way they want to engage with us. So it informs our channel, our sales operating model and our channel strategy, which where we've got in the short time space a real focus on the contact center, um, and the digital channels, again, reflecting the simplicity of how they want to transact with us right then into field and account management to have a more human interaction, understanding those more complex business needs, and especially businesses that are rapidly scaling so that we can target the solutions for them in terms of the market, we are growing and there are positive signs. However, it is still challenging out there. We are still feeling the effects of the global pandemic as well as in the UK, experience a cost of living crisis so businesses and consumers alike are having to really think differently about their costs and really scrutinize every penny spent. So we need to demonstrate to our customers why BT offers them a value that's better than our competitors can in terms of competition. So in the 0 to 9 space, we face very similar competitors in the big space.

So we've got Vodafone VMO two playing in that market and it's all around network availability as well as price. As we transition into the medium space, we start to see the competition landscape become much more fragmented and we start to see a lot more smaller players coming in that offer much more localized customer experience. And often there can be quite a range in the geographical deployment of fiber or 5G. And we see these smaller competitors being able to go in and have more targeted conversations with those businesses about what they can offer them. So it is a very different competition landscape from the bottom end up to the top. If you think about just to summarize where Snbs. So our base is growing. We're seeing good growth across our core portfolio and as well as good positive steps towards our adjacent revenue streams. We've recently launched a financial services platform called Tap to Pay, which allows small businesses anywhere in the UK to take payments directly on their phone, which again, just spreads the types of products we can offer alongside our core competency products.

And it emphasizes the value of why customers are better on BT, and it expands that value in the base. The technology landscape is rapidly evolving and the needs of our customers are rapidly evolving with it. So from a telco perspective, we're doing a number of things. So we're rolling out fiber across the UK. We have the best coverage in the UK currently. There's a huge migration from the old copper legacy network into into fiber to allow businesses to have rapid speeds across the country. Similar to that, we're also moving away from 3G, 4G networks to a rapid 5G infrastructure, and given that our Openreach colleagues, they deploy fiber on the most intense people areas, when we get into remote locations, 5G can become a real offering for businesses that want rapid connection speeds but maybe don't benefit from having fiber access. And finally, we're having to change our propositions to suit the transition back into hybrid working. So our businesses have workers and whether they be in the office, at home, in the field, they want to know that they can have rapid connectivity from us.

They can have the solutions from BT with it all being done securely. We know that the threat from cybersecurity is becoming a real, real factor in the buying habits of our entire base, right from small to top. So when we think about the customer, we interact with the customer in many different stages. But it really summarizes down into three main journey touchpoints. So acquiring customers to the BT base. And fundamentally this is done on aggressive trading and playing into the areas where we have a direct competitive advantage, whether that be the fiber rollout where our competitors don't access or our 5G network. When it comes to enrich, it's all around customers join BT. It's about making them understand the breadth and the value of the portfolio that we have. I was recently in a conversation with a small independent cafe, and they were talking about how they the value they get from the BT services, and they didn't know that they had guest Wi-Fi, which sounds really ridiculous in this modern day age, but they were giving out their Wi-Fi password to every single customer that came through the door.

Obviously, the cyber security threats and that is intense. The fact that just through a conversation, they learned that they had this this feature that was actually game changing for their business. And although it seems quite small to us in the room for that business owner, it was massive. And the enriched stage for me is about understanding our customer base being. And this is where personalization comes with understanding what's really important to them and their organizations, and how we can leverage the breadth of the portfolio to meet those outcomes. And finally, when it comes to retention conversations, the fact that we've spoken to them proactively throughout that the life stage of BT, that we know what's important to them and we know enough about them to personalize offers to make them stay with us, um, is really key. So that customer contact strategy is so fundamental to everything we're going to talk about, but it's about maximizing the moments that matter for our customers. So coming on to the transformation program that we're leading. So when I think about base management, it really is around the enrich and retain journey stages.

And we had to strike a balance of the short term business case returns that we need to launch a program like what we're doing. As you know, pressures are tight. We need to be able to demonstrate that we can make a difference quite quickly. But for me, leading this function, it's all about building long term capability so that we can stay ahead of the market at every opportunity. That distilled down into kind of three main transformational objectives or goals. So first was to increase the base visibility. And this is something I'm incredibly passionate about because for me taking on this role, I want to know everything I can about the customers within my base. How many bakers do we have? How many recruitment consultants do we have?

How many doctor surgeries do we support? What products do they buy from us? How many products do they buy at a time? Why do they buy those products? Thinking about the channel operating model, do we sell different contract lengths in different channels? Are we having different conversations? Are they driving different financial outcomes? Thinking about the the value that the products that the customers give us. So are we getting the maximum rpu from a certain industry versus another?

And why is that the case really starting to investigate that so we can get we get excited about it. Right. Understand how I can do a better job, better commercial strategies that drive greater value out of my customer base is so essential to everything me and my team do. The second is about improving our data and intelligence approach, and we can understand as much as we can about the base, but then it's about turning it into action. So we have some propensity, model and capability within BT today. But for us to be best in class, we need to expand that exponentially and really have data led decisions, informing our marketing strategy, informing the leads that our sales teams are activating and improving the intelligence that those leads are generated from. So linking up the disparate data sources we have. So whether or not be that sales information we're capturing, whether that be service touchpoints that we know not to speak to a customer about a new product with BT if they've just had potentially a negative service experience or they've had an outage or a billing fault. Factoring all of that into the propensity models means that we can drive a much better return, and we can start to kind of prioritize those leads in a much more effective way.

And finally, moving away from a kind of product based approach to more of a customer lifetime engagement approach, and that's about identifying those customers that have the maximum value within our base. So who are those that are going to spend the most with us, and why are they going to spend the most with us and that we prioritize those leads. And I think actually we can get so by by action, um, transformation goals one and two, we can really inform that much more strategically than we do today and and prioritize our marketing budget. Right? Our marketing budget is finite. We need to be much more targeted with who we speaking to, and we need to inform the operating model in which that we're targeting those customers through. Are they something that just wants a straightforward digital engagement, or do they want an account manager conversation? Do they understand the products and services they're buying, or do they need a human to talk them through it in more detail? So where are we now?

Before we started engagement with E and Tim's going to talk through a bit more about what they've been doing. I was really keen to to understand the az's position. So understanding where are we versus where we want to be. We conducted over over 100 interviews with frontline staff, commercial colleagues, propositions, product leaders talk about like what are we doing well and what could we be doing much better. We've been speaking to the Pega team as well, about integrating some of the work that we're doing with them around, looking at our technology capabilities, how can we expand that and factor in that into the overall kind of position that we're at today, which is kind of I talk about the base experience, and that's much broader than just my team. That's everyone that interacts with essentially a recommendation coming out of the data team, right through to it being actioned with a customer and all the teams that are involved in that end to end process. So we looked at it, we said across kind of four main spectrums. So strategy people and process customer engagement data and technology scored us. This is obviously an illustrative example.

But we've got this for where we are in SMB 1 to 4. We used insight from EA around what does best in class look like and what are our kind of industry peers doing , how do we face up against them, and where are we able to really talk about the things that are going to make a big difference? I think when leading these types of programs, you need to have a vision, but you also need to be realistic about the transition states that your organization is going to go on to get there. I think talking to stakeholders about those different transition states is key for them to understand the story and where we're trying to get to and continue to support and invest in this program. So distilled down into kind of two of the largest opportunity areas for us to focus on and And conveniently, they link back to the three transformation goals, which is the customer engagement model. Understanding, having this holistic view of customer engagement and building up that customer 360 picture, that visibility of of our customers and our interaction is fundamental to everything that my team do and will determine whether or not we're successful or not. That's only as good as the data that informs it. And by us building out our data science capabilities, that's building more machine learning on the models, building more models, creating greater linkage between those models and the always on campaigns or the marketing that we're driving fundamentally gives us a much more mature base management capability. Okay, perfect.

So I think not to steal a tagline from the keynote earlier, but customer love, um, BT but actually a lot of telcos today will look at their customer base through the lens of a product. I.e if I've got a customer that has a particular product and they're up for a renewal, I will have a conversation with that customer about that product and about renewing that product with us. Where we would like to get to is how do we look at the broader view of the customer. And there's just a couple of sort of scenarios up here on the slide. So if we look at the current state and again, how a lot of telcos view their customer customer A and customer B, exactly the same segment, have the same product, it's in the same product lifecycle stage. Therefore, I will have the exact same conversation with those two customers with very little consideration to actually what do we know about those customers? What scenario are they in? What are the characteristics that we should look at to tailor our to tailor our engagement? So the work we're doing at the moment with BT is making sure we really do put the customer first and take a customer focus.

And as soon as you start to do that and you see on the right hand side, the left hand side in the blue is you start to get a much deeper understanding of that customer. So when you look at it and start to unfold it, you go, well, yes, they're in the same segment, but they've got a different product mix at different relative product lifecycle stages. They're different sizes and actually they're showing us different potential value. Therefore our engagement needs to match that potential within within the customer. So just by looking at the customer differently, we can already think about how do we actually reimagine the way we're engaging with our customers. Now for us to to do that and we'll talk a lot more of the transformation. It starts with what we call the 360 view of the customer. And once you've got that, that, that visibility that Simon was talking about there, that combined with propensity models, commercial targets and objectives, gives us a view of what type of conversation should we be having with the customer, what we would call a sales motion, i.e. , do I need to be having a conversation about attaching more mobile services to broadband services, or do I need to be protecting my customers against potential churn?

Both those two things are kind of fundamental parts of our transformation that will touch on a little bit more detail in a minute. Once you've got that, then you can look at your customer characteristics and that ultimately can help inform. How do we engage with that customer through what channel, in what order, and ultimately making sure we're serving the right content at the right time? So how does Pega kind of underpin what we're doing? Fundamentally, we're not starting from a blank sheet of paper. Pega is already up and running within our organization. It's already driving personalized offers both in the outbound and inbound channels, and we've got a single joined up view. So if when an agent speaks to a customer, they know exactly what offer was sent to that customer, and it gives them that commercial flexibility of what things they can talk to them about and expand on. But there is a huge amount of opportunity that we can do with Pega, and I think we as a business are built.

We're investing huge amounts in our digital capabilities. We want to push as many transactions as we possibly can through a digital experience, and integrating Pega into that and making sure that with all the work we're doing to understand more about our customers and the data science work that we're driving in this program will help us inform which offers we present to customers via the website. At the moment, our agents have asked for and we've tried a number of different things, but fundamentally we're kind of offering 15 to 20 different offers and giving them the flexibility to to dictate based on the conversations that they're having. When it's a website, we can only we need to be really targeted. We've got one opportunity to win that customer, and therefore we need to know enough about them to drive that personalized offer on the website. I think the other thing that we need to to really maximize again, on on this is how do we get coverage over more and more of our products and more and more of our channels. At the moment we're mainly using Pega in said, in the contact center in the desk channel. But expanding that right up to the account management space, we've got a lot of opportunity to add in more products as we as we're scaling up, like I said, across our adjacent revenue streams, factoring those in. So that decision is really customer centric rather than the product focus maybe we have today.

I think we're a little bit too, um, yeah, driving it at individual product requests rather than that customer lifetime value approach and saying what would they want? They might not want it now, but what are they going to want in the future? And using some of those characteristics that we've picked up along the way of those data points, you feeding that into Pega to to give better recommendations. So the transformation and I'm going to attempt to summarize a 12 month engagement in eight minutes. But there's sort of a couple of areas that are worth going on this morning. So just as a reminder, three overall goals that we're aiming for. Increased bass visibility, take a more data led approach and look at how we deliver a customer lifetime value as kind of a center pillar from an engagement perspective. Now, for us to deliver that, we focused on four areas the customer 360 view, um, the AI machine learning propensity modeling capability, the customer engagement model, and how martech fits all into that. So I'll just talk through each one in turn.

From a customer 360 perspective, what we wanted to do, as Simon said at the start, is how do we give a detailed and accurate view of the customer base? And whilst that may seem like a simple ask, you would be amazed at how little organizations have that complete view of their customer and are able to interrogate it in the detail that will allow them to then look at what are the commercial strategies and interventions that I want to run to get the best out of my the best out of my base and dependent on the level of your data, maturity and accuracy. This in itself is a is a is a fairly decent challenge. But what we've built is this customer 360 view, and that allows Simon, his team and the leadership team within SNB to interrogate that base. Look at how many customers they have in a specific industry. Look at what is the rpu for a customer that has one product with BT versus products across two product towers and ultimately track those those trends over time to to look and see how that that improves. What we'll also do is give a market an external perspective to see how does BT perform against their peers. So if BT is at a certain rate of churn, what is the market saying? Is that better?

Is that worse? Because again, that should inform the various interventions that you run as a as an organization. And then the final part of this that you'll see the sort of video there on the left hand side is how do we surface that insight as next best actions to our agents. And that would differ depending on the segment that we're that we're working with. So in an SMB world that will be done through things like Pega through Dialers. So it's insight at hand, meets the agents when they're engaging with the customers to inform. Right. What is the best conversation I should be having with this customer right now? If you're more of an enterprise world, then that can be through an agent, an account view that gives you that insight in terms of informs the conversations that you're having.

Right and given. I'm stood up here and I'm a consultant, I mentioned GenAI. We're also looking at embedding GenAI into that dashboard that allows people then to interrogate that information further, generate proposals, points of views, etc. , etc. off the back of that. Now for us to get those next best actions as part of that work. There's obviously a lot of work from a data engineering and building those AI and machine learning propensity models, and the work we've done in BT is is a couple of things, but ultimately builds off the foundation in the customer 360 view. That in itself took a lot of work in just in terms of stitching up every part of all the data sources that BT had. So in one of the models that we built early doors, there was 94 different data points that we stitched together to give us a real clear understanding of what what does what indicates propensity within a certain customer, and how can we start to to use that data.

Now, once you've done that, you can obviously start to go and develop those those models and ultimately those models will have and the work we've done, there are two outcomes. First is to identify the opportunities and where customers have propensity for a particular product i.e. , should we be having a conversation with that customer around networking or voice or mobile or whatever it may be? And then secondly is how do we surface that insight and how do we explain that insight to sellers? The outputs of the models themselves, um, are not the most digestible for your front line salesperson that wants to have a conversation with that agent in real time. So the second part is about how do we then explain that to an agent that can then use it immediately and effectively? Now once they've got that insight and we think we know, then what's the type of conversation we need to have with the customer? We've developed what we're calling the customer engagement model. And that is ultimately the vehicle that allows us to personalize each of the conversations we're having with each of the customers.

And that customer engagement model will ultimately be different for each individual customer, depending on various different characteristics, and it will take a number of things into into account. Firstly, it will take into account, right? Do we have a view of what we believe is the propensity of a customer to hit their maximum customer lifetime value? And that again can be can be told to us by the models. But if we have that view, where, where how do we therefore want to engage with that customer? If we look at it, therefore, in a product level and a product lens, we know they've got high potential or low potential, but what's the next best product for us to have a conversation with them that takes them on that journey for us to maximize the value with that that customer has with us. So once you take those things into consideration, along with the customer characteristics we we mentioned, you then get personalized journey that says customer A you are showing high customer lifetime value potential. This is what we think the next product is for you. Therefore, these are the types of conversations we're going to have with you.

This is the channel we want to put you down, etc. etc. , etc. . Now excuse me first to first to be able to do that, there's a number of different capabilities that need to be in place to deliver personalization at scale. And a key part of that is the technology stack that sits behind it. If we want to drive automation, the technology is there is a fundamental, fundamental part. So there are a number of capabilities that are, Simon said. That start is we're looking at in terms of what do we need to improve to improve maturity from a base management perspective, whether that is your channel strategy, your OT model.

But fundamentally it will be underpinned from a technology point of view. So whether that is your decisioning tools and Pega, whether that's your CRM, your marketing automation, your order management. If you get those right and integrate them and are able to deliver a seamless, in this instance, the lead to cash journey, you are then going to be able to deliver that personalization at scale and deliver various different business outcomes along along that journey. So that's it. Seven minutes. summarized the 12 month transformation. Obviously. Welcome. Any questions?

Thanks for your time . Right. Thank you very much, Tim. Thank you. Simon. Um, if there are any questions, as I mentioned before, if you wouldn't mind just, uh, finding the microphones in the middle of the room here and perhaps while, uh, you're thinking about your own questions, I'll ask one if that's okay. And that's really just a view on, um, for the audience, on on any challenges, lessons learned you've had so far along the way and, and your approach to overcoming those? Simon , do you want to start and then. Tim, if you got anything.

Yeah, I think um, probably two points. I think the first one was around just understanding the data landscape. It's incredibly complex in a company or an organization like ours, and just being able to identify all of the available data sources. Who's the expert in that thing, the rules around it. So we looked at, um, churn rules as an example. And there were so many different definitions. There were definitions by customer size, there were definitions by product. And when you're trying to pull that all together to to build a model against, you have to understand all of that. And I think just just navigating the breadth of the data landscape at BT, um, was a big challenge.

And I think actually we've done we've made massive strides to join up teams, um, to join up disparate data sets. But there's definitely more work we can do there. And then I think if I think our second point probably around the Pega usage and the provision of MBAs. We're seeing agent usage be very variable. We started off doing what any logical person would do and would pay agents to use it and when, and that drove really great kind of business benefits. We saw rpu increase. We saw churn reduce. The second we stopped that, as the usage started to then decline, and then we're constantly in a battle now of how do we get agents to understand the cultural shift we need to go on as an organization? It says by using this platform or this tool, you get better outcomes.

You get more customers to have longer conversations with that transition of, again, thinking about a customer lifetime value means that you might sacrifice an initial product conversation for a much more detailed, solution led conversation further down the line. But. the way that we currently remunerate our sales colleagues is that they just want to get the first thing over the line ticked off and move on. So it's the cultural shift that we need to go on as an organization to drive up. The usage will mean that everything we're doing here is fundamentally more valuable, and if they're not using it, obviously we can only do so much. So there's a bit of a cultural piece we need to go on. Yeah. So I think to build on one and add my own, I think I'll be I won't get people to do a show of hands. But if we said how good is our customer data and how accurate is it and the quality of it, I think that's obviously a fundamental enabler to all of this and is something that now we've built the customer 360 view.

It's how we maintain that level of accuracy. I think the second thing with all these things in complex organizations, these things, the risk is they happen happen in isolation. So whilst we're building these incredible models and we can run these campaigns off, how is that linking with the overall business objectives and fixing fitting in with other initiatives? Right. So if you know, we want to deliver a certain journey, do we have the digital capability, the channel structure that can can do that? If not, if we're working in isolation, we're just not going to get the benefit. Thank you. Any. If you wouldn't mind just just using the mic.

That would be would be great. Thank you very much. Hello I'm Carolina from OP financial Group from Finland. I had a question related to objectives and metrics. How has this initiative changed your objectives and metrics from where you started to where you are now? So I think in the starting point. So I've been in this role about nine months, and the first thing that I wanted to understand was some of what are the key kind of KPIs, OKRs we track as a function. And just to be really honest, they're quite limited. And that was to do with some of the challenges that Tim mentioned around understanding our base, better understanding the amount of customers we have, what they have with us.

So when we started this program, I was really keen to say, what does success look like? And not just success in the short term, which is what we've built the business case primarily on, which is can we deliver an increase in our penetration rates? Can we drive up arpus? Can we reduce churn? But to measure it on the long term capability that we're building. So we've looked at our data and AI capabilities and said how many propensity models do we actively have today? How many would we like to have? What's the current visibility of the customer? 360.

What's the amount of data sets we've integrated into that 360 picture? Where do we want to get to? And again, that's why that transition states mapping is really key because some of those we can do in the next year ahead with AI. Some of them are much longer term things that my team then need to take on and run with. Um, fundamentally, the the main kind of base metrics that I'm looking at is the product holdings. So what's the product attachment rates? We know that the more products we can get customers to take from us the sticker they are and that by default drives down churn. Our Rpu metrics are obviously really key for us. So thinking about one the contract lengths that we offer, but also the different tariffs within our product sets.

So in broadband for instance, we're looking at increasing the amount of customers that have, um, higher connectivity speeds. It's pretty straightforward. But we have a lot of customers that are on legacy packages, um, that we can get a lot of value if we just shift them up. And having that visibility of the base means that I can go and talk to the propositions team and say, I have this amount of customers at this tariff that have nowhere to go, and they're eventually just going to churn because there's nothing. We're just going to keep kind of price rising them until there's nothing. There's no more value that we can add from them. So by creating, by being able to feed that into propositions, we can create new tiers for them to move to, etc. . So it gives us more things to aim at.

And then the other thing is, which I'm always constantly reminded of is the contract based metrics. So how many customers have we got that are vulnerable for competitors taking them away from us? Have we got, um, customers that are just ticking over out of contract? That's just a matter of time till someone comes and poaches them. So how do we get them back in contract? So out of contract base is a massively important metric of mine. That helps. Yeah. Great.

Great question. Thank you very much. Hi, I'm Kunal from Verizon. I have a question like you guys are a huge organization. So how did you align with the other teams and partners and stakeholders to implement such a program ? Like, you know, you might might have impacted a lot of engagement channels, processes, you know, how did you come up with that? Did you guys have like an executive mandate or did you use your power of persuasion? Yeah. Yeah.

So I think you you probably hit the nail on the head. Right. Firstly this was from, from above. So there's a leadership mandate in terms of this is what we want to do, not just across SMB but BT business as a whole. So how do we create something that is that is relevant and applicable for BT business broadly and then obviously tailored for the subsegments of sit below. So there's a very clear, clear vision in terms of what leadership wanted to achieve, which is obviously incredibly important because those same people are probably coordinating a lot of the other initiatives that are going on at any given time. And, and how we tie that, all that all up as part of a sort of broader transformation program. But I think what what for me, one of the key things is we spent a lot of time with a lot of people, right, right down to the, you know, traveling around the UK, sitting in call centers, listening to agents, understanding the conversations they're having with customers, the challenges they're facing through to the people that are involved in Simon's team, from running the base through to the trading team that obviously look after the numbers through to marketing through to the broader sales channel owners, etc. , etc.

so it's both top down and bottom up in that. In that respect. I think probably more of an internal end, right. But we see a lot of the big transformation programs in BT that are running for multiple years, and they're not necessarily because they're so amorphous in the scale of what they're trying to achieve. The results are not always that rapid, and people often just kind of forget they're going on, or they just acknowledge the fact that this is a future thing that you're eventually going to see some value of. I think the key thing that we had was we can demonstrate value pretty much straight away. And actually this stuff is it's there for sales teams to use. And that's by Tim doing. we did a lot of like the almost at the bottom up engagement by going out to channels.

But actually I did a fair amount of just talking to sales leaders about, look, without this, there's only so much acquisition, so much hunting that you can do in the market. Like we've got so much value in our base. If we just build these capabilities, it gives it's your way or mechanism to realize your objective. So internally within SMB, we did a lot with the sales teams because typically they're the front line staff are the most vocal on these things. If they're getting benefit from it and salespeople are getting paid more, they'll be much more vocal around the success of it. I think the other thing is understanding. We've gone through quite a lot of organizational restructures within BT over the past 12 months, and whether that being data and AI, whether that be in the CIO or the digital space, Understanding how all the different programs that are going on, there's a huge kind of modernization shift at the moment within BT. How do all the different building blocks fit together and again, keep the same transition states? But for me, it's so key being able to talk about by the time in six months this is how it fits in with your IT modernization program or your sales force deployment or your ServiceNow migration.

Here's how Pega fits into that journey and working with the architecture team. Working with our consumer division, working with the digital colleagues to say this is what we're doing. And yeah, there might be some stuff that actually is focused on the here and now, but we need to be constantly having those conversations about where does it fit into in the next kind of one, three, five year journey that the business is on. But the brutal reality is there's a huge amount of like, chess pieces that you need to move around and lots of relationships we need to do. We have like robust governance forums around our project, but also now more broadly, talking to organization about what we're doing so that everyone knows there's tries to remove that ability to have disconnects in the different programs. But but it's challenging and I think we need to do more on that. So you mentioned the need for Cross-silo collaboration in making sure this is effective. Do you want to say a few words about how you've structured the teams so that they're aligned to the business outcomes, but also they foster that collaboration? Yeah.

So, um, so when I joined the team, my organization was focused predominantly on product. So we would have product and life stage. So we'd have someone that would look at, um, essentially the enrich of, say, broadband and someone that looked at retain. Um, what that meant was we were making product focused decisions, and we were often just operating in a silo with no context of that wider customer picture. So as part of this, as part of this program, one of the first things we did was to reorganize around customer outcomes or commercial outcomes. So we've got for instance, we've got some that looks at churn. We've got someone looks at cross-sell, upsell , migrations. So they cover the breadth of the portfolio that we offer. But there there's no kind of product focus.

It's truly customer centric in this new way of working. We've also set up kind of a squad structure, which means that not only the base management team involved and before there's lots of different handoffs with different teams, whether that be we need to work with the data team to get a model built. We need to then put something into a marketing front door to get a campaign generated. We need to speak to trading about what offers we can do. We need to speak to regulate all the different teams that are involved in getting a campaign to market. We're all disparate and they're all different front doors. It was just incredibly convoluted way of working. So we brought all that together into these cross-functional squads now around business outcomes. So everyone that needs to be involved in fixing churn is in that squad.

And they're actively engaged. And we've got members that are permanent. So the data science team, my team marketing, they're full time embedded in these squads. We've then got floating members, which would be the trading team. So actually if mobile churn is the most important thing that we need to fix as an organization, the trading representatives for mobile are in that squad for that period of time until we've till we've launched stuff and then they can kind of move back to base. Same with propositions. If that focus is we need to get a new proposition developed. They're there for a more of a finite period of time. We can flex flex them as and when needed.

But I think it's having all of the levers in our control massively streamlines everything we're trying to do, and it reduces that complexity of interacting with loads of different teams and stops things getting lost in the mass of BT, and it becomes much more transparent way of working. But we're two months into it, so it's good for now and hopefully it'll continue to get better. You talked about data stitching right across the CRM finance application building to create that customer profile 360 degree view. Can you just elaborate on that? You know, how did you mean when you said stitching, you know. Yeah, yeah. So bt a unique situation where and it's not unique in terms of when you look at acquiring organizations, but you had the BT business and the E business that that came together and inevitably with all these things worked off completely. Different systems track customer data in completely different ways. So the fundamental task is, well, a couple of things.

One, how do we define a customer? And again, that seems like a simple question, but there are all sorts of ways that a customer is defined within the BT environment. So how do we define a customer. So we've got a single ID. And then secondly is where we're stitching all these together. And if I take the BT and EE example together is how are we taking the two systems with that identifier and then and then ultimately layering all the data that sits below that. So for the first time, you can look at a customer in one place and have a complete visibility of what they're buying across BT, across E, the different types of services, what they're spending, usage, etcetera, etcetera. So when we talk about that, it basically stitching disparate data and data points together and having a single definition of. Of the customer.

And then that allows us to interrogate the base in its in its entirety, as well as look at it from an individual customer perspective in terms of what's the next best action. We should we should be offering them. But fair to say, I think it's a significant effort, but but an incredibly valuable one just in terms of getting that visibility. Ability. Good. Thank you very. Much. Final questions or should we wrap there lunchtime? Yeah, we are in between you and lunch, so I think we'll wrap there.

So yeah. Thank you for the questions. Thank you for your attendance. Thank you. It's appreciated. Thank you to Simon and Tim. Thank you. Enjoy your PegaWorld experience and have a nice lunch. Thank you.

Cheers.