Ringing the changes

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“You are one of one, but being connected breeds more fun, and more opportunities,” opens the spoken word poet voicing the advert for BT Halo. The ad lists the numbers of connections we need in our lives, from e-sports to climate change marches, in order to highlight the benefits of BT’s combined 4G, 5G and fibre broadband plan.

Connectivity is BT’s core business, and it’s at the heart of Georgina White’s mission, too. As group insight director, she is leading a change in how insight is placed at the heart of decision-making at the company. Since she joined in 2018, insight has been centralised to serve all parts of the organisation, and now she faces a new challenge – the function has created such a thirst for knowledge that it needs to double its capacity to meet internal demand.

In 2018, the company recognised that insight needed to be a strategic asset to help create a “single version of the truth”, says White. Since then, efforts have been focused on laying the groundwork to build one single function after bringing together teams from across BT, EE and Plusnet, and embedding insight into core company processes – leading to a conundrum that other insight professionals might envy – teams wanting more.

“We’ve created so much pull for insight that we have to ensure we can prioritise and serve that insight. We are quite a large team, but we can’t keep growing the team; instead, we have to automate processes, create self-serve capabilities and be as efficient and effective as we can.”

White reports to the chief strategy and transformation officer, alongside other strategic functions. The 100-strong insight team sits in a corporate group function working with all parts of the business and focusing on four core areas: marketing intelligence; brand and strategic insight; customer experience; and commercial insight.

This central position of insight means the team can get involved in “all levels of decision-making and strategic processes”, says White. Among other things, this could mean repositioning, such as BT’s ‘Beyond Limits’ brand relaunch in late 2019, or more regular product or service launches.

“At any point, the team will partner on projects like ‘what is the long-term strategy for BT?’; ‘what new markets should we enter?’; ‘what propositions do we bring to market?’. There’s a real variation in what we get involved in, from 10-year strategic projects to in-year activity.”

Such a wide-ranging remit also means that making insight more widely available is another priority for White. “We have to democratise insight – it cannot be that it sits in the hands of a few people – that won’t drive change in an organisation of 100,000 employees.”

All insight produced at BT – as long as it’s not confidential or under NDA – is made available to all employees through a portal on a company-wide intranet. The thinking behind the company’s recently launched TV packages, for example (see boxout), would not have been available pre-launch but can now be accessed.

There are around 30,000 people accessing and engaging with the portal at the moment. However, White says it’s not enough just to make data accessible. “We need to make it intuitive, easy for people to self-serve, and we must use different strategies for engaging different audiences – what we take to the board is very different to what we might take to contact centres.”

The team is preparing to launch a new portal with an improved do-it-yourself function and machine-learning tools to suggest content based on previous searches. White says they are considering how call-listening activity can be placed there, and reviewing how to support the business to increase the impact of the hub. “If we create the ability but we haven’t told anybody how to use the tool or engaged the business, it’s fairly pointless.”

One of the biggest priorities for White is assessing how to work best to partner with stakeholders from across the business. “Insight is only insight if it drives an action.” As part of this, White feels it’s important that the insights team behave as leaders. “We need to ensure we are part of the teams across the organisation, so that we feel more like a virtual team.”

To do this, the insight function has a business partnering training and development programme designed to help it understand what the business wants from it and delve into people’s individual preferences – what motivates and drives them, how they like to communicate and operate, and what role the insights team plays in a business life-cycle. As part of the programme, everyone in the team took part in a series of workshops around core skills. 

White is also focusing on ensuring the team is as inclusive as possible, and says she is trying to encourage a less hierarchical approach to the organisation – for example, the person who did the work presents it, instead of it being passed up several levels.

At the same time, she acknowledges insight doesn’t always get the final say. “We often don’t own the decision-making – the stakeholders do in terms of what they take to market. But we have a key role influencing that decision.”

BT Halo was developed as a result of this close relationship, with most of the research done with Basis.

“It was developed as a result of working really closely with the product and propositions teams to work through the benefits that customers would want and the role this could play in helping them connect quicker. We then fed that insight to the creative brief.”

Fascinating data

Triangulating different datasets helps BT discover new insights and highlight gaps in its knowledge.

“As an organisation, we have access to some tremendously brilliant, fascinating datasets – we know the benefit when we bring those together with research to help give the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ which, I think, is really important.”

White says the company combined its internal data – customer data from across BT, EE and Plusnet including firmographics, revenue and product holdings – with external data from Experian, IDC and segmentation insights from recent studies. It then used machine-learning techniques to model the likely wallet for every business in the UK.

“This ensures that we understand the opportunities and where to prioritise the company resources and focus,” says White.

When the work was completed, the insight team could give “a holistic view” of BT’s market share and give an answer to the question of where BT’s existing products and services should go next, according to White.

Keeping things fresh

Insight is clearly a partner and adviser within the business, and this also applies to how BT works with its agencies.

The company has a hybrid model, with some insight conducted in-house – typically its customer experience research, analytics and marketing intelligence – but the majority of its market research is conducted by a core group of agencies and consultancies: Amethyst, Basis, Decision Technology, Incite, Ipsos, Populus, Sparkler, Strive and The Customer Closeness Company.

“We see these businesses as strategic partners,” says White. “They’re almost an extension of the BT insight team, and they are hugely important to the performance of my team and us as a business.”

She looks to the company’s agencies to challenge them and push the team to be more innovative. “It’s super easy for us to get caught up in the business-as-usual – the politics and priorities of BT – so how do they help keep us fresh?” One of the ways this takes shape is that the core group of agencies comes in and showcases work from other firms, within confidentiality limits – “helping stimulate ideas across the team”, says White.

Additionally, quarterly meetings are held to talk through business priorities and share work from across the insight team to help BT’s agencies understand its challenges. “Holding us to account is really important – it’s very easy to say they’re a strategic partner but if I’m not treating them in that way, then they need to call me and my team out on it.”

For White, who held insight leadership roles at British Gas, Capital One and Centrica before joining BT, the company’s biggest challenge is also its opportunity – the team needs to be involved in a range of different parts of what is a fairly complex organisation. “This means, as a team, we work on a really wide variety of topics. I love the fact that throughout the day what we are working on really varies – it makes for a stimulating and challenging environment.”

Testing and learning

In February, BT relaunched its TV packages so that the content customers can access on various plans was more flexible.

At the start of the development process for the new TV proposition, the approach the insight team wanted to take did not resonate internally, says White. “We weren’t successful in engaging the business in the way we wanted to execute the insight plan. We wanted to trial a different approach that we believed would lead to a great customer outcome, but it was a very different way to how we’ve operated with the business in the past.”

While the team did not get the buy-in to the first plan it proposed, it rolled out a more “traditional insight plan” and then moved to a market sizing and propositions test, White says, but then hit another stumbling block.

“The results clearly showed us that the current favoured proposition by the TV teams and positioning wasn’t enough to get customers to switch – they were happy with their existing provider, and our offer wasn’t strong enough to break that. Price alone wasn’t converting.” 

They then took a step back and worked closely with the marketing and other teams to develop a new, more creative approach to the insight. Firstly, this involved uncovering some initial territories based on behavioural theory, supported by an online community. The team then held co-creation workshops with consumers and followed up with focus groups. Finally, quant testing of various proposition options showed that there was a significant uplift and gave “robust backing” that a flexible approach to the proposition worked.

The team used the new approach to get stakeholders much more heavily involved in the process, White says, helping them act on insights much quicker. “We unlocked new insights that would lead to the proposition being much more successful. We realised that it was really important to get that buy-in.”

This article was first published in the April 2020 issue of Impact.