BT accelerates innovation to RiseUp with ServiceNow

Defining digital transformation

As one of the world’s largest managed service providers, British Telecom (BT) is constantly innovating to empower customers and drive revenue growth. As part of this focus on innovation that matters, BT is currently embarked on a far-reaching digital transformation program to deliver a broad range of cloud-based services using a next-generation system stack.

ServiceNow is a key component of this stack, allowing BT to provide world-class support as part of its product offerings. According to Cesar Augusto Negri de Oliveira, Product Owner at British Telecom, “Support is a critical part of all of our major contracts, and customers expect us to deliver the best. With ServiceNow, we’re able to offer great support experiences for our new products around the globe, and we also lower costs compared to our legacy support tools. And customers really want ServiceNow. For example, being able to easily integrate BT’s ServiceNow platform with a customer’s ServiceNow instance is a real competitive advantage for us.”

Accelerating the learning curve

BT initially took a minimum viable product (MVP) approach to introduce its next generation of cloud-based services. The company focused on a single product offering so it could get fast feedback and optimize its broader launch based on these learnings.

ServiceNow was an essential part of this MVP—great support isn’t optional—so BT needed to bring its process users on its operations team up to speed quickly. To do this, BT decided to request custom training from ServiceNow. According to Cesar, it was absolutely the right decision. He says, “The ServiceNow training team worked with us to understand our processes and adapted the training so it was a perfect fit for the way we work. It really accelerated our learning curve, so our operations teams had the in-depth knowledge they needed to support the MVP and could provide the feedback we needed to move forward.”

Empowering the core team on a new product

As well as training key users on operational teams, BT also used ServiceNow custom training to train its own training team, adopting a train-the-trainer approach. This prepared BT to move beyond its initial MVP, allowing it to scale ServiceNow skills and fill talent gaps as it started to launch additional product offerings.

Cesar says, “Our training team has now trained hundreds of people at our service desks around the world, and the number continues to grow. This ability to scale quickly means we can sign and support new contracts faster, especially contracts that include newly launched products. It’s also a big competitive differentiator—if we can deliver in three months while our competitor takes six, customers are more likely to go with us.”

Driving additional revenues with tiered support offerings

As BT continues to RiseUp with ServiceNow, the company is now planning to expand its support portfolio to deliver additional customer value and revenues. As they grow their footprint, they know that ongoing training—both for their core team and their end users—is a critical for maximizing the value of their ServiceNow investment.

Cesar explains, “ServiceNow provides a wide range of capabilities beyond the core incident and change management we deliver to customers today—for example, CSM and ITSM automation, cognitive AI, and problem and vulnerability management. As we enable these capabilities, we’ll be able to offer customers multiple support tiers as part of our contracts. Once again, this provides a competitive differentiator and unlocks additional revenue streams. We’re looking forward to working with the ServiceNow training team to bring our operations teams up to speed on these additional capabilities—our experience has shown that by partnering with ServiceNow, you achieve great results, and you achieve them faster.”