BT outsources customer self-help to Motive

A year after BT standardized on Motive’s software for its broadband customer self-help operation, the British service provider has gone one step further – it has outsourced its customer self-help operation to the Texas-based software company, in a move expected to save 500,000 pounds per year.

Motive software has been in BT’s network for about three years now, but this move shifts the existing infrastructure from the U.K. to Austin, where Motive will provide 24-7 support and handle all infrastructure changes and upgrades.

“Motive has had the ability to host our solutions for our customers for years now,” said Kenny Van Zant, executive vice president of Motive. “BT is taking advantage of that, moving its Motive infrastructure back to us. “

That infrastructure touches millions of BT small business and residential broadband customers, as well as hundreds of its customer service representatives. Besides the cost savings, the primary benefit will be speed of deployment of new service offerings and upgrades, Van Zant said.

Normally, service providers of BT’s size and stature expect their hardware and software vendors to help build network systems, train support staff and then transfer operation, he added.

“For BT to move in the other direction is a major change that reflects the competitive pressures of the IP world,” Van Zant commented.

Among those pressures is the need to schedule system upgrades and changes, in amongst all the other network operations.

“You get slotted in when they can handle it, which isn’t usually as quickly as you’d like to be, or even as they’d like it to happen,” he said. “This way, any upgrades can be done more quickly and we handle it.”

This kind of remote hosting capability is made possible by the nature of IP networks, Van Zant explained. BT CSRs will still operate from the same Web console they have used to provide customer service in the past, but that console is connected via IP to servers and systems in Austin.

“We have a set of on-demand capabilities that we have delivered from this facility, typically aimed at Tier 2 operators,” he said. “But for Tier 1 folks to take the deployment of our full solution nd put it in our hands signals the fact that operators are willing to extend the benefit of that [hosted] model.”

BT has been a strategic customer for Motive, leading the way in deployment of its customer self-help system and in standardizing on that system for its broadband services. This move by the British giant could also signal change elsewhere because, as BT deploys its 21st Century Network, moving to an all-IP model with total broadband access, it is considered an industry leader.

“The time-to-market pressure for new services within an operator is so tremendous,” Van Zant said. “People are doing the typical things – relying on partners to provide more and more of not just technology but also management. Operators are carving off special groups within the company and trying to create startups within the operators. They feel there is more pressure to combat the typical perception of being slow that comes with being large and tightly integrated. It becomes easier for them to rely on a more vertically integrated approach from a vendor like us.”

Motive doesn’t rely heavily on hosting revenue, he added. Although the company has about a dozen hosted companies, who collectively represent about 20% to 30% of its business, the real moneymaker is still the licensing of software.

“It helps us sell more licensed software if we can provide a number of models – hosted, remote management, do-it-yourself,” Van Zant said.