Welcome to our quality story
I am delighted to welcome you to our quality story.

So where do we begin? With the people at the heart of the story: our customers. BT Retail has 21 million customers all of whom have their own needs and expectations. We are committed to delivering an excellent experience for each and every one. For our consumers, this means giving them all kinds of ways to get together. For our business customers, it means delivering an experience that, above all, gets results. Real no nonsense results such as making money, saving money, making the best use of time and technology - the kind of results that all businesses, including ours, depend on for their growth and success.

This commitment to delivering an excellent customer experience is embedded in our strategy, in our measures and, above all, in what everyone in our organisation does every day. We know that we always need to do more and so have an ongoing drive to improve the way we work.

For us, quality is about delivering on our customer commitment while meeting the expectations of our employees and shareholders and playing our part in society as a whole.

Put simply, happy employees help make happy customers help make happy shareholders – a virtuous circle if ever there was one.

We make quality real in our business by ensuring it is just part of our day to day work. Which, in turn, ensures we never stop striving to improve what we do for our customers, day in day out.

In the following pages we outline our approach to quality - how we build it into everything we do and why it is such an important part of our business. I hope you enjoy our quality story.

A wholehearted commitment to quality
Our commitment to quality is enshrined in our Quality Charter and in our values.

Our Quality Charter
Our Quality Charter sets out how we go about delivering quality and what this means for everyone in BT Retail. To live up to our Quality Charter, we build its principles into the way we work from day to day:

Putting customers at the heart of what we do

This involves:

• Understanding what is important to our customers and striving to deliver this
• Listening to our customers and acting on their feedback
• Identifying and resolving the root causes of customer problems in order to improve the customer experience

Delivering on the basics of quality

This involves:

• Expecting and empowering everyone to be involved in improvement
• Basing decisions on facts and using quality tools to fix problems in a constructive way
• Anticipating and addressing potential problems before they happen
• Looking at the real cause of a problem, not the symptoms
• Checking that what we did worked and making the improved way of working our new basic standard

Using processes to manage performance proactively

This involves:

• Being clear about which processes we operate to meet customer needs
• Measuring success against customer expectations as well as having clear, simple and benchmarked measures of performance
• Systematically reviewing process performance, learning from experience and continuously improving through effective analysis and targeted improvement projects
• Radically transforming to achieve completely new levels of performance through innovation

Providing a clear focus for all our people

This involves:

• Having a clear strategy that everyone understands
• Building a business plan for all teams so that we all focus on the important things
• Ensuring everyone understands what is expected of them and that we balance the needs of our customers, shareholders and people
• Reviewing performance so that we focus on root causes and improvement

Our values sum up what we believe in and how we behave. They guide everything we do and say:

• We put our customers first
• We are professional
• We respect each other
• We work as one team
• We are committed to continuous improvement

Everyone in BT Group holds these five values and they remain just as relevant today as when they were first set down back in1990. In BT Retail we have added two more values of our own to underline the extent of our commitment:

• We are obsessed with quality, delivering on the basics and engaging everyone in improvement
• We are creating the place to work and win

Bearing in mind the addition of these two values, you could say our long held commitment to quality is now even more intense.

Totally dedicated to customers, now and in the future
We are totally dedicated to making things better for our customers. This comes through in our mission - what we have set out to do; and in our vision – our view of the future and of our role in creating it.

Our mission
Our mission revolves around a total dedication to the quality of service and experience our customers receive from us:

Our vision
Our vision paints a vivid picture of the future we are determined to create. It captures where we want our business to go, what we want to achieve, and how we will contribute to the world at large by making it a reality. In so doing, it sets an audacious goal for all of us to rally around and pursue:

We have the potential to connect every person to every other person in every way possible. We can connect every business to every business, every business to every one of its customers, every group with every group, and every community with every community. Our vision will be realised when every customer can access the whole world as instinctively and intuitively as breathing.

Fulfilling our mission and vision
Our mission and vision define where we are going. We will get there by implementing our strategy.

Implementing our strategy
Improving customer satisfaction while simultaneously reducing the cost of failure is our number one priority. This is a job for everyone in BT Retail, beginning at the top. The BT Retail Leadership Team is actively involved in driving quality throughout the business. They have set the expectation by creating the Quality Charter and they are demonstrating their commitment through their development and stewardship of a strategy that puts quality at the heart of everything we do.

Our strategy focuses on creating an outstanding customer experience, creating value for our shareholders and creating the place to work. The strategy, and the progress we are making towards achieving it, is regularly communicated to everyone in BT Retail.

We implement the strategy through scorecards balanced across four strategic areas (financial, customer, process, people) and a series of programmes. The scorecards play a critical role in helping us deliver and track the progress of our strategy.

We manage change in the business through a set of programmes linked to our strategic objectives. Each programme is owned by a senior manager. The Leadership Team regularly reviews the results of these programmes.

Each of the business units produces detailed business plans and a balanced scorecard. Senior managers are rewarded for achieving personal objectives tied into these scorecards.

The Leadership Team reviews the progress in achieving our goals on a monthly basis. The Team also reviews the continued appropriateness of the programmes and strategy through a series of scheduled workshops.

Alongside these reviews, we hold innovation workshops where people are invited to contribute ideas for new business opportunities to help us achieve our goals. The innovation workshops are just one of the ways we encourage our people to get involved in moving our business forward. So we can quickly capitalise on new business opportunities, we have established innovation units where we incubate new ventures.

We know that in order to continuously improve the customer experience we have to continuously improve the skills and know-how of our people. To this end we have, for example, developed an Excellence In Management training programme which uses BT’s own technology and culminates in an official graduation hosted by the CEO.

Effective management systems and strategy
Running our business to deliver a superb customer experience

Performance management
Systematically analysing and improving performance

Innovation
Stimulating new thinking and ideas and turning them into innovative products, services, ventures and ways of working

Getting everyone involved
Harnessing the enthusiasm, experience and creativity of our people

Training
Giving our people the skills to continuously improve

Improving the customer experience
We continually measure, review and improve our customer delivery – based on what our customers tell us about how well we are doing, not on how well we think we are doing.

Understanding our customers’ needs and expectations
We have developed models to help us better understand what drives customer satisfaction. We use our understanding of these drivers to improve the way we work and continually measure our performance against them.

We survey our customers in a variety of ways, from contacting them after we have provided a service or product through to ad hoc telephone interviews. We also routinely compare our performance with that of our nearest competitors so we can see how well our customers feel we are doing relative to our rivals.

One of the key drivers for customer satisfaction is quality of service. To systematically improve service quality, we have identified the things that really matter to customers and how much each one counts. Armed with this insight, we undertake a detailed weekly survey of business and residential customers which tells us how we are doing based on service provision, repairs and complaints.

Improving our performance through processes
We use a wide range of quality tools to help us improve the business and deliver excellent products and services for our customers. These include diagnostic tools such as business excellence self-assessment, cost of quality and statistical approaches to help us understand the capability of our processes and operations and identify and prioritise opportunities for improvement.

We have introduced greater focus on working with data, and are using systematic approaches to our management of performance to help us achieve both incremental and step change improvements in quality.

We also place great emphasis on continually raising the standards of performance of our people at all levels and across all sections of BT Retail. We make sure that the way we assess the performance of our people is at all times fair, objective and consistent. To this end, managers have to base discussions about performance on clear evidence and facts.

Building quality into the system
Our commitment to delivering excellent quality to our customers is demonstrated by the registration of all our activities to the internationally recognised quality management systems standard, ISO9001.

BT Group first achieved ISO9001 registration for all of its activities worldwide in 1995 and we have maintained our registration since then. The scope of our registration is: 'The provision of BT Retail Products and Services'. All elements of ISO9001 are addressed within our organisation and our registration is assured through regular visits by our certified assessment body. Our Certificate Number is 0963976.

Alongside ISO9001 registration, our quality approach has been recognised in other ways too. Over the years, BT Group and BT business units have won various quality awards and prizes.

Continuously improving environmental performance
As part of our commitment to quality, we aim to build on our excellent record of environmental management. We were one of the first companies to produce an environmental policy statement, over a decade ago. We firmly believe in being open, transparent and accountable and have been detailing our environmental performance and improvement programmes in publicly available environment reports since 1992. In 1999, we achieved ISO14001 certification for our environmental management system covering all our UK operations.

We have an ongoing commitment to prevent pollution and minimise the impact of our operations on the environment through a programme of continuous improvement. To see how we are doing, take a look at www.bt.com/betterworld.

Delivering quality through our people
We are creating a place where our people are encouraged, empowered, recognised and rewarded for delivering an excellent customer experience.

Developing and training our people
We use an Investors In People accredited approach to develop and train our people. It ensures everybody has plans in place to focus on developing excellent professional and personal skills and capabilities in support of local objectives and business strategy.

We also encourage our people to become actively involved in society. Initiatives include providing time for working in schools, supporting charity and voluntary work, getting involved in public service, and acting as assessors on regional and national quality awards.

Getting everyone involved
We want to harness the enthusiasm, experience and creativity of all of our people. We also expect people to share good practice and be involved in improvement activities. We recognise that this is not just about getting involved in the big things but also about what our people can do on a smaller scale from day to day.

Getting involved means generating ideas for improvement, joining problem solving teams, taking part in key strategic change programmes, as well as initiatives within their own team. We support these activities with a website where our people can add and share ideas and also learn about improvement tools and techniques.

Recognising and rewarding our people
We recognise and reward our people, particularly for noteworthy achievements and performance – it’s a key strand of all our strategic programmes.

Our Recognition Scheme supports every area of our work. While everyday and special recognition cover the full range of people’s day to day responsibilities, exceptional recognition focuses on significant contributions to the following strategic priorities:

Customer Satisfaction: actions and behaviours that give external customers world-class service resulting in them being delighted with us

Quality: achieving exceptional quality improvements; consistently working in a quality way

Innovation: successfully delivering a new approach/product; introducing an innovative way of working; creating new marketing opportunities

To reinforce the vital roles Customer Satisfaction, Quality and Innovation play in BT Retail, we recognise and reward people for their contribution in these areas based on pre-agreed criteria. The Managing Directors of our businesses nominate teams and individuals for the monthly CEO awards for Customer Satisfaction, Quality and Innovation. These awards culminate in the annual BT Retail Exceptional Recognition awards honouring the year’s outstanding contributions to the three areas.

Measuring how satisfied our people are
Since the early 1990’s, BT has routinely measured the attitude of its people. In BT Retail we have introduced the ‘Our Place to work’ survey. It gives all of our people the opportunity to express their satisfaction with the leadership of BT Retail, their understanding of the strategy and their personal development and involvement.

Results from the survey are benchmarked both with business units across the BT Group and with external organisations and are used to drive improvement activity.

Quality partnerships
We recognise that we can’t do everything ourselves. To ensure we stay at the forefront of innovation and technology and deliver the best possible solutions to our customers, we work with strategic partners both inside and outside BT Group.

Our partners include some of the world’s leading organisations. We work with Nortel, Cisco and Avaya to deliver the best telecoms technology solutions; with Microsoft and Oracle to deliver world beating applications; with Sun and HP to deliver best in class IT platforms and infrastructure; and with Accenture, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young and CGI to deliver Thought Leadership and innovation.

As you’d imagine, we are always on the look out for new ideas and partnerships to broaden our capabilities and, in turn, the solutions we can offer our customers.

Quality in the supply chain
All of our key strategic suppliers must be able to demonstrate that they meet exacting quality standards. Potential new suppliers undergo a Supplier Capability Assessment to gauge whether or not they can meet our delivery, capacity and quality requirements.

As a result, we can manage risk, agree business improvement plans and performance improvement conditions and make knowledge-based procurement decisions. This, in turn, ensures quality runs through the design, development and delivery of our products and services.

Quality throughout our business
We are dedicated to quality. Our 21 million customers expect it. Our business is geared up to deliver it.

Our strategy focuses on creating an outstanding customer experience. Our people and our systems focus on making this a reality. We continually assess our progress and the effectiveness of our programmes – through monthly reviews held by the Leadership Team and through regular workshops where our people are invited to contribute their ideas on how we can improve the way we do things.

At the highest level, in our day to day activities, from the way we organise ourselves to the way we judge and reward our performance - throughout BT Retail, we are committed to delivering excellence for our customers.