In the summer of 2023, Darren Bayney was working as a business service enablement consultant with BT Group. He’d been tasked with forensic examination of the firm’s sprawling business field services operations, with an eye on improving the sustainability credentials of the organisation
The business field services team included over 160 engineers, carrying out more than 6,200 visits a month up and down the country, delivering mostly cloud or BT Net Switch services to clients.
At the time, BT hadn’t implemented a fleet management system to either track engineers or optimise the deployment of its resources. It was gathering data on site visits, but it was stored away in siloed systems and wasn’t being analysed.
An initial look at the data revealed the average travel time for field engineers was around 66 minutes, but there was a high proportion of trips to customers that were taking over three hours
Having engineers spending so much time on the road – and not servicing clients – put a dent in the department’s productivity, as well as inflated its CO2 emissions.
If resources could be better deployed, it was clear that BT Group would benefit on multiple fronts. Not only was there a chance productivity would increase, as travel times went down, but the telecoms operator would reduce its carbon emissions too.
Bayney, who’d worked with BT for over 35 years, poured over the data and found that the “utilisation capacity of the engineers was probably below where it should have been“, he said.
Bayney didn’t stop at crunching the data – he began to examine the existing company processes. “I had to go through all the field engineering data to understand their journeys, understand the times, [and] the tasks that they were doing, and how long those tasks took,” he said.
It soon became apparent that the project required the close involvement of the engineers. The project looked “at the voice of the process and the voice of the engineers. I had to understand what the behaviours were,” explained Bayney.
Before moving ahead with any changes, the engineers completed an anonymous survey.
The study revealed several inefficiencies within the field services department. For instance, engineers were driving to jobs only to find the client was unavailable, or turning up to jobs without the right parts or tools to complete repairs.
It was also clear that the time spent on certain tasks varied between engineers. While some would take two hours on a job, others were “doing it a lot quicker”, said Bayney.
“We needed to transform what engineers were doing, using the data that we’d got. From a process point of view, we needed to make it leaner in certain areas,” he added.
To claw back time, improve the utilisation of engineers and cut carbon emissions, the management team quietly reduced the time allotted for specific tasks. This freed up time on jobs, introduced greater flexibility into work scheduling and enabled the engineers to visit more customers.
“It made sense from a customer perspective; we could be more flexible and get to more customers.’’ commented Bayney.
The team leveraged technology to further introduce operational efficiencies. From March 2020, BT Group rolled out Rescue Lens, a product from GoTo Technologies, across its business field engineers and business customer service teams.
The technology allowed service agents to send a BT-branded SMS to a customer’s smartphone. Within 20 seconds of the customer tapping on the message, it activated the camera on the customer’s phone, so they could show the agent the problem.
“Rescue Lens is a purpose-built cloud-based video calling solution, but instead of face to face calling, GoTo has focused on the remote takeover of the rear-facing camera on a smartphone,” explained Bayney.
As COVID hit, the rollout of Rescue Lens accelerated, and sparked a wave of customer-centric initiatives.
Now service agents could visualise a problem, they were able to capture more information on each job, which was passed on to other areas of the business.
The Engineers now had a much better idea of the scope of work before visiting a site, and could prepare accordingly. In some cases, they realised they didn’t have to visit clients to carry out site surveys — they could be done via Rescue Lens.
Some engineers even started using Rescue Lens to remotely troubleshoot jobs with apprentices.
The work with Rescue Lens earnt BT Group several UK Customer Experience Awards in 2021 and 2022. The changes enabled by Rescue Lens also helped the business field service engineers to slash their carbon footprint. Between 2022 and ‘23, the reduction in site visits saved 2.3 tonnes of CO2 a month. “By 2023 this had increased to 3.0 tonnes of CO2 savings per month,” added Bayney.
The work with the field engineers also threw up a sizable change management puzzle. Bayney and the team had to subtly shift the business culture, to focus on continuous improvement (CI). “We needed [engineers] to close jobs down first time because the customer expects us to be delivering,” commented Bayney.
Change management legwork involved convincing engineers that CI was in their best interests, even if it pushed some of them outside their comfort zones. This evolved into a constant communication with the engineers about how their roles were changing.
“You’ve got to sit with people and walk through how this will change [their] life. You’ve got to be honest with them and say, you need to evolve… or else you’re going to be left behind with redundant skills,” explained Bayney.
The environmental aspect of the project also started to resonate with the field engineers. One initiative that came from the engineers themselves was the collection and recycling of old BT-branded kit, which was sitting gathering dust at customer sites. By collecting older equipment, the engineers were able to build a small stockpile of spares that could be used to maintain older, but still operational equipment.