Inbound Contact: More benefits for regional / global customers

Inbound Contact
January 17, 2013
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Thanks to new capabilities around the world, new infrastructure in Chile and a new platform in Asia Pacific, Inbound Contact Global on the Global Managed Voice (GMV) IP network offers even more to customers.

Read on for to see what’s new and what it does for you.

New capability on BT Inbound Contact Service Global platform

Over the past two years BT has been migrating customers onto a new, more feature-rich platform for its Inbound Contact Service.  The latest addition to the new platform is customer “allow and denied” functionality. [Read more...]

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Meet Mark Amoss, new GTM general manager, international voice business

Mark_Amoss
September 20, 2011
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Mark Amoss recently joined the BT Global Telecom Markets (GTM) team as general manager, international voice business.  Global Telecom News introduces him to you in this interview.

How did you come to GTM, Mark?

I spent the past three years managing the international direct dial (IDD) product portfolio across the BT Group.  One of the responsibilities of my team of pricing, product management and system specialists was to help sales account managers get voice offers out to our customers.  I liked working behind the scenes but wanted to be out in front with our customers.  GTM gives me the opportunity to do that.

What excites you about working in GTM?

Even though BT is probably the seventh or eighth largest international carrier and one of the largest wholesalers globally, research indicates that we have yet only addressed a smaller part of the global IDD voice market.  That means we have a huge opportunity to grow our business by helping our customers.

How do you plan to do that?

We will show customers that they can trust BT to carry their voice traffic. For example, I’d like them to know about our world-class International Network Management Centre at Oswestry. The INMC brings together international voice, signalling, transmission and commercial teams into one central location.  It manages traffic for all of the company’s European nodes and provides pre-emptive and proactive solutions and outstanding 24×7 customer service.

We want to further develop our ability to meet our customers’ requirements, to deliver what they need in terms of quality, reliability and value for money. To do that, we have to get to know our individual customers better and understand their requirements better.  Then we have to leverage the products we have and roll out new ones to meet those requirements. So we envisage a customer-connected approach and not an anonymous rate table business. Clearly, taking this approach clearly will help us enable our customers to succeed.

We also want our BT Global IP Exchange to lead in the roll-out of IP Interoperability.  The Global IPX is already changing the way we sell voice.  Rather than buying minutes, many of them are starting to buy an IP-based connection to our platform and use it as a starting point for migrating traffic to IP, adding new services and addressing new market segments without the need to change the platform in the future. This will save them a lot of money.

BT Wholesale focuses on the market in the United Kingdom but GTM looks at the world.  Do you plan to travel to meet customers in your new role?

Yes, in fact when I started the new job on the first of July, I had already met GTM customers at International Telecom Week (ITW) in the US .  In the first month I visited many customers and BT people in seven countries on three continents, and I plan to visit others soon.

Is there anything you would like to say in closing?

Yes: I’m excited about my new role and I look forward to meeting as many GTM customers as I can to understand  their requirements and hopefully help them address those requirements with our portfolio.  I plan to attend Carriers World in September and the Global Carrier Community Meeting in October.  I hope some of the people reading this will come to see me there.

If they would like to make an appointment, or to talk before then, they can contact me now.

Biography

As general manager, international voice business, Mark is responsible for managing the distribution channel for International direct dial (IDD) service for BT Global Telecom Markets (GTM).  He brings 20+ years of experience in the telecoms industry to his role.  A recent addition to the GTM team, he came from BT Wholesale, where he led commercial management. Before joining BT, his experience included finance- and interconnect-related management positions in City of London Telecom (COLT) and Cable & Wireless.

This is Mark’s second tenure in BT.  He first worked for the company in 1990 at BT’s innovations centre at Adastral Park.

In his spare time Mark enjoys gardening and country pursuits.  His idea of a great vacation is big-game fishing for days at a time.

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Spotlight on BT products and services – A carrier’s perspective on cloud services

Andy-Macfarlane
January 13, 2011
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At the Gartner Symposium in October, BT talked about cloud services for large enterprises to help them move beyond the hype and implement valuable, reliable, and cost-effective real world solutions.

An interview with Andy Macfarlane  [Read more...]

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Seizing new market opportunities with BT’s Global Inbound Services

Bild4
October 10, 2010
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As your customers, today’s enterprises are under significant pressure to improve contact center efficiency and reduce costs while meeting increasing consumer demand for superior service. Their end-customer interactions need to be handled intelligently if their organization is to increase customer loyalty and maximize effectiveness from existing resources. As a result, your corporate customers look to you to provide them global inbound voice services to enable them to succeed and grow business. With BT’s Global Inbound Services, we offer you a wholesale based white-labelled solution to enhance your portfolio accordingly.

With this Premium service offering you can enable your corporate, MNC and enterprise customers to optimize their service levels and reduce their costs by routing callers around the globe to the most appropriate agent or automated solution to handle inquiries. Reliability is an imperative – no matter where the calls originate from, or where they are answered. With you offering them BT’s Global Inbound Service under your own brand, they can harness the reach, intelligence and reliability of BT’s global network to improve their inbound call management and serve their end-customers more efficiently.  [Read more...]

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Spotlight on BT products and services – An interview with Beatriz Butsana-Sita

beatriz3
October 10, 2010
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Looking ahead, what are BT Global Telecom Markets’ priorities for its portfolio?

Cost efficiency and innovation. In a rapidly changing world, you need to remain agile. BT Global Telecom Markets (GTM) therefore continues to evolve its portfolio of products and services to help customers succeed in the competitive global marketplace.

BT GTM has already introduced several frameworks and propositions to help specific target groups achieve more innovation and cost efficiency.

The BT GTM roadmap helps lay out the approach for developing our portfolio and helps us drive its evolution.

Can you tell me more about the BT GTM roadmap?

Our roadmap shows our commitment both to implementing services to help customers leverage new wholesale capabilities and to continuing innovation to enhance our portfolio.

Three objectives drive the evolution of the GTM portfolio:

First, we aim to offer our customers a best-in-class cost base for traditional services, helping them consolidate their assets and services and maximise cost efficiency. Customers can then afford to invest in innovation and in targeting new markets.

Second, we want to help customers transform towards IP-based next-generation networks (including a consideration of business processes, portfolio and operational improvement) with a broad offer of consultancy and professional services.

Finally, GTM looks to offer a comprehensive range of IP-based wholesale services so that, when customers are ready, they can make a full migration towards IP. This includes enabling innovation and quick entry into new markets and segments to meet increasing customer demand.

IP-based communication continues to offer new opportunities to operators. How is BT GTM helping its customers exploit them?

One way we are helping our customers exploit the wealth of new IP-based business opportunities is our Interoperability framework. By enhancing connectivity among operators, it enables them to offer more value-added services and to enter new markets.

Our global IPX services enable communication providers to connect to each other, to connect their end users to other operators’ end users, and to pay and get paid for doing it. Because the IPX aims to enable true interworking between providers, the approach is independent of the technology, networks or devices used. Therefore it creates that seamless experience customers want when they use communications services.

What about traditional services such as voice – how do you see these developing?

To help businesses extend the functionality of their voice offerings, we’ve introduced Ribbit-based voice applications. Ribbit’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) allows carriers to innovate and derive new value from their current networks. Ribbit helps corporate customers drive more of their voice traffic via the web and integrated user experiences, thereby making the most of their voice network investment.

We intend to make Ribbit available to the wholesale market to enable all operators to compete head-on with companies delivering internet TV over the public internet (“OTT” -over-the-top- players), social networks, etc. Ribbit’s PaaS is similar to a cloud computing model.

So BT GTM is interested in cloud computing?

Yes, certainly – because cloud computing helps customers who want to cut costs, innovate faster and deploy services flexibly and without high up-front investments.

An example of a BT cloud application is our Virtual Data Centre service. VDC is a pre-provisioned, data centre-hosted infrastructure that delivers the next generation of data centre service. It enables you to create, deploy, monitor and manage your own Virtual Data Centre infrastructure through a secure self-service portal. Automated provision of storage, computing and access ensure maximum efficiency. VDC is rolled out in the UK and across Europe, with more international launches ahead.

Have you made changes in any other areas of your portfolio?

Yes, for example we’ve also made changes in our reseller and white-labelled portfolios.

Our services for resellers enable them to offer their customers attractive products based on BT infrastructure. One is our Switchless Reseller Service, which enables reseller and brand extender companies to offer voice communication services without setting up their own switches or interconnections to other operators. With our new Wholesale VoIP offerings we allow resellers to migrate to IP when and as they need it. So we can offer them an end-to-end portfolio maximising the potential of traditional and new-wave reseller voice platforms.

And we extended our white-labelled portfolio with Global Inbound Services. They help operators and communication providers to serve their corporate customers more efficiently on a more resilient and feature-rich platform. They also help those corporate customers reduce their costs (for example, BT offers several caller-pays options) and to meet increasing end-consumer demand for higher-quality service.

By making Global Inbound Services available as a white-labelled reselling solution, GTM helps operators boost their portfolio without the requirement to invest in the time, hardware and global capabilities required to sustain such an offer. Readers who want more information can read the article about Global Inbound Services in this issue of Global Telecom News.

With your focus on innovation, what is happening to BT GTM’s traditional portfolio?

We’ve also increased the pace of innovation in our traditional portfolio to offer new services such as Sigtrans for RoamConnect, which enables mobile network operators to offer their customers enhanced roaming. We also offer SMS Hubbing to simplify the delivery of SMS messages, avoiding the need for operators to have agreements with individual network operators around the world. SMS Hubbing also provides ensured delivery of SMS messages within 15 seconds to 75% of all destinations, with proof of delivery provided from the called party’s handset. This enhancement is generating a lot of interest; many operators have been waiting for it.

Is there anything you would like to say in closing?

Yes, I’d like to add that I’m always eager to listen to our customers who want to talk about their needs and how GTM can help them. We put customers at the heart of our portfolio. Their opinions are very valuable to me and help me ensure that customers stay at the centre of our business.

And of course they are welcome to call me or send me an email.

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