Customers can now go online and access detailed, regularly updated information on exactly how well BT Wholesale is performing on their account across the products and services they buy and use.

It follows the launch on 2 July 2007 of an initiative that gives BT Wholesale customers sight of netVIEWplus: the same in-house management information reporting system that BT Wholesale people themselves use when answering customer enquiries on an account.

Business Improvement Consultant Paul Mason explains the thinking behind the new ‘self-service’ approach: "Customer satisfaction is central to this. Customers were saying that we don’t always tell them what’s happening on their service order deliveries and when we’re dealing with faults. So with netVIEWplus we’re taking our ‘keep the customer informed’ commitment to a completely new level. We are opening up our own data and performance indicators to them and making it available through www.btwholesale.com simply by keying in their standard user ID and a password."

POSITIVE FEEDBACK

Thirty Communications Providers of all sizes have already registered to use netVIEWplus. Early adopters include Sara Webster, a Vendor Relationship Executive at Star, a leading business solutions provider that runs its own UK network. BT Wholesale supplies Star with a broad mix of products and services, including ADSL and SDSL services and Partial Private Circuits.

After just a few weeks of using netVIEWplus, Sara is already a real enthusiast – but she admits she was apprehensive when she first heard about it: "We were using the Broadband Customer Reporting Tool before. That often gave us problems because of missing or inaccurate data or older reports not being easily available. We thought it would be more of the same with netVIEWplus.

So we were genuinely astounded when we tried it for the first time and discovered just how fantastic it is – and how easy to use."

There are important business efficiencies, particularly in saving admin time. Sara continues: "We now have everything on all the products we buy from BT Wholesale all in one place through one log-in: even products such as Megastream Ethernet that we buy from other parts of BT. Plus, all the product documentation that we previously had to hunt for on the BT Wholesale site is there too.

That’s ideal when you’re training new recruits as they only have to take on board one set of instructions. We know the data is very accurate too: we’ve compared it with our own records. Our business is gaining already so we’d have absolutely no hesitation in recommending netVIEWplus to others: this is a great tool for every customer."

Operation teams at the UK-focused business telecommunications company THUS have also had a positive ‘first impression’ of netVIEWplus and are using its functionality to "successfully filter data, drill down to the circuit detail and produce graphs".

FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

Paul Mason is enthusiastic about future plans: "It was our aim to make netVIEWplus as intuitive as possible and we’re hearing that we’ve achieved that. But members of my team are also here to answer questions and talk people through how to get the best from the system. We’re also more than happy to give demonstrations on customers’ premises if they’d find this helpful."

The netVIEWplus development team is already at work on the next phase of the project. Ideas in the pipeline include automated e-mailing, daily reporting options and a white label version, which will enable customers to badge the management information data as their own. Mike Verburg from THUS comments that he’s "looking forward to the Enhanced Reporting, especially the ability to view BT’s performance to our customers."