The CX Impact Awards took place on July 29th and showcased Ireland's leading practitioners of customer experience across a host of sectors. The digital awards show, broadcast from the BusinessRiver Studio right in the city centre, gave strong voice to the 30 companies on the shortlist – all of whom are displaying high standards of CX.
One of the impressive organisations on that list were BT Ireland, who were a finalist in both the CX in Telecoms and CX Team of The Year award categories. This was a significant achievement for the company, in its first year of entering the awards, which was the culmination of a decade-long journey that has seen the communications and IT service provider transform itself into a customer centric organisation.
Shay Walsh, managing director of BT Ireland, regularly speaks on the topic of CX. He explains how a decision was taken back in 2008 to better understand customer journeys from the sales cycle through to customer service and ongoing support. “We needed to improve the areas our customers were concerned about and create a better experience for them,” he says.
Working with Deep-Insight, a European customer experience organisation, BT developed surveys and metrics to measure customer relationship quality, and things began to improve. This was a decade ago when IT companies were struggling to unleash a new wave of technology built around cloud and focused on digital transformation. Customer expectations were high, and they expected vendors to be every bit as agile as their solutions.
John O’Connor, chief executive of Deep-Insight, has nurtured many organisations through CX improvement but few have made such a rounding success of it. “BT is one of the most customer-centric organisations I've ever seen,” he said, emphasising that CX success is directly related to financial success. “When we first engaged with them, BT Ireland was an unprofitable organisation in the middle of a deep recession brought on by the global financial crisis. Today, it’s one of the most powerful parts of the global BT organisation.”
BT Ireland played a key role in the digital awards show by presenting a very special award, the CX Leader Award to An Post. When Shay Walsh presented the award on July 29th, he alluded to the uniqueness of the occasion; "We are proud to be sponsoring this award in this year of all years, when the whole concept of customer experience has never been so challenged or so valued," he said. "The pandemic has tested companies in different ways, but I have no doubt that the ones that have forged deep relationships with customers will have been better able to withstand the pressures that lockdown forced upon them. That's certainly been BT Ireland's experience."
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