Speeding customer service delivery.
BT streamlines its contract process to improve experiences for customers and employees with Adobe Sign.
£630K
Savings annually
in print, postage, and document storage costs
Objectives
Provide customers with an end-to-end digital journey by eliminating the need to sign paper contracts
Help customers get started with BT products and services faster by accelerating the customer contract process
Increase revenue by helping agents focus on sales and customer service instead of administrative work
Results
£630K savings annually in print, postage, and document storage costs associated with a single document workflow
Reduced average contract turnaround 99%, from 28 days to 7 hours
98% decrease in time spent creating, chasing, and uploading contracts
Sending service contracts to customers for signature in one step with Salesforce integration
“Using Adobe Sign to complete service contracts, we’re digitizing the last mile of the customer journey and creating a seamless digital experience for our customers.”
Kirsty Goddard
Head of Digital & Innovation, BT
Quality customer experiences for millions
BT Group aims to deliver a better world through the power of communications. Millions of customers in more than 180 countries choose BT Group for the best in broadband, fixed-line telephone, television, mobile, and networked IT services. For BT, excellent communications doesn’t just mean providing innovative services across channels, including new and emerging technologies such as home automation platforms. It also means communicating effectively with customers and providing seamless, high-quality experiences at every interaction.
“Customer experience is huge for BT,” says Kirsty Goddard, Head of Digital & Innovation at BT. “It’s the glue that keeps customers here instead of going to a competitor. Deliver the right experiences for our customers and they’ll continue to come back again and again.”
BT Local Business has 38 locations throughout England, Scotland, and Wales. To better serve its business customer, BT Local Business strives to get customers what they need as quickly as possible. Customers frequently interact with BT Local Business through digital means: researching product and service options on the website, chatting with sales representatives through live text chat, and even placing orders online. But before customers could finalize an order, they needed to sign a contract. In the past, the customer experience switched to paper so that both customers and company representatives could sign the contract.
This analog contract process was lengthy and labor-intensive—and didn’t match the experience that an innovative technology company such as BT wanted to give its customers. BT Local Business decided to make the leap to electronic signatures to create a fully digital customer contract workflow. BT was already using Adobe Experience Cloud to optimize its marketing across online and offline channels. So, the company looked to Adobe as a trusted leader in delivering digital experience solutions and chose Adobe Sign, part of Adobe Document Cloud, to deliver an easy and reliable digital signature solution.
“Using Adobe Sign to complete service contracts, we’re digitizing the last mile of the customer journey and creating a seamless digital experience for our customers,” says Goddard. “Adobe Sign improves the experience for both customers and staff so that we can provide the innovative service that they expect from BT.”
“Our average turnaround time for contracts has gone from 28 days to 7 hours with Adobe Sign. Customer satisfaction is going up because turnaround is so much faster.”
Andrea Swann
Global Admin Lead, BT
Customer satisfaction on the rise
Before implementing Adobe Sign, sales agents either mailed, emailed, or even hand-delivered contracts to every customer. Customers would sign the document, then either scan or mail the signed copy to return it. BT Local Business could only activate services for customers after receiving, checking, and filing signed contracts, so it could take weeks for customers to start using the services they ordered.
“Our average turnaround time for contracts has gone from 28 days to 7 hours with Adobe Sign,” says Andrea Swann, Global Admin Lead at BT. “Customer satisfaction is going up because turnaround is so much faster.”
BT Local Business chose Adobe Sign over other options due to its simplicity. Using built-in integrations with Salesforce CRM, sales agents can build a sales contract in Salesforce and send it to customers with just three clicks. Customers receive an email with a link that allows them to view and sign the contract in minutes. The signed contract is automatically uploaded to Salesforce and Adobe Sign notifies all parties that the contract has been completed.
Switching to electronic workflows does more than just improve the turnaround time. Adobe Sign provides a clear record of who signed the contract, where, and when. This helps BT Local Business provide a reliable audit trail to meet compliance and regulation standards.
“We identified one specific security feature that we needed to meet compliance,” says Swann. “Adobe was on board with us from day one to help us implement that feature into the latest release. There’s not many companies that I know of that will go that far for a customer.”
Working with electronic documents also creates dramatic savings for BT Local Business. The company can reduce paper, print, and postage costs, while eliminating the need to store and organize thousands of sheets of paper. This adds up to savings of £630,000 annually associated with the company’s customer contract workflow.
“The cost savings with Adobe Sign are astronomical,” says Swann. “We’re already saving £630,000 annually in paper, printing, postage, and document storage and the savings continue to increase as our business grows.”
Decreasing processing time by 98%
Switching to digital contracts through Adobe Sign has also been an advantage for BT’s customers. Customers can sign any time, any place, and on any device—whether they’re sitting in their office or riding a train home. Customers can even have the contract signed by multiple people in multiple countries without any extra effort.
At the same time, Adobe Sign workflows also improve experiences for BT Local Business staff. Between Salesforce and Adobe Sign, sales agents spend far less time creating contracts, chasing paperwork, and uploading contracts. Instead, they’re spending more time on the road and increasing revenue through greater sales. Through Adobe Sign, agents can check on the status of a contract or even send a reminder for the customer to sign it in seconds. As a result, Adobe Sign helped to decrease the processing time for contracts by 98%.
“Adobe Sign improves the experience for our sales people,” says Swann. “It makes their lives much simpler and they can spend more time working with customers, which improves customer experiences even further.”
Multiple business units across BT are now rolling out Adobe Sign to meet growing business needs for streamlined workflows and easy-to-use electronic documents.
“With solutions like Adobe Sign, Adobe really supports us in transforming our customer experiences,” says Goddard. “We have a fantastic relationship with the Adobe team. They are a trusted partner and work with us to get the best out of the products so that we can deliver the best capability back to our customers.”
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