Building demand for reliable connectivity.

Strengthening the UK’s position as a global digital leader

Both David Bulman and Daniel Ellicott enjoyed their fast-paced careers at BT Group, the UK’s largest provider of telecommunications services. But when given the chance to work at subsidiary Openreach as Head of Digital & Content and Digital Product Manager respectively, they jumped at the opportunity to directly impact the experiences of millions of people across the UK.

Openreach, is a wholly owned subsidiary of BT Group — and is the UK’s largest wholesale broadband network provider — building, installing and maintaining a digital network available to 32 million homes and businesses, close to 97% of the country.

The company’s goal is to build the connections that matter and bring its new ultrafast, Full Fibre network directly into homes, schools, hospitals, and businesses — a change that promises to improve reliability of connection speeds and reduce faults by up to 80% compared to traditional copper-based networks used by most UK households.

“This is the UK’s biggest infrastructure project right now,” says Bulman. “We’re on the front line to drive a digital revolution that will help turn the country into a digital leader.”

As an open wholesale telecom network provider, Openreach doesn’t directly sell services — that’s the role of its 700+ Communication Provider partners. Instead, the mission of its website is awareness, education, and technical support. Many people in the UK don’t completely understand Full Fibre, how it differs from current broadband options, and what it can do for them.

After several years running the Openreach website, Bulman, Ellicott, and the rest of the digital team had a solid understanding of website visitors and their questions. They outlined a strategy to deepen customer engagement online, but complex customisations to the on-premises Adobe Experience Manager Sites content management system (CMS) and integrations with Zendesk Garden limited possibilities.

They sought a new CMS to build and deliver more compelling customer experiences and found their answer in Adobe Experience Manager Sites as a Cloud Service.

Getting timely news faster

More than 70% of the 700,000 monthly visitors to openreach.com want to learn more about Full Fibre services. The updated website provides a central location for education, fibre build progress, and connecting with broadband service providers. Plus, a fibre checker application on the website invites visitors to sign up for fibre build updates in their area.

Knowing that people want quick answers to their questions, Bulman and Ellicott prioritised speed. A key difference for Openreach is the switch from an on-premises CMS to Experience Manager Sites as a Cloud Service that quickly scales up or down for maximum performance. Visitors now experience much faster load times as they browse articles, load service maps, connect with service providers, and find the right support for their broadband query.

Since the move, the website has achieved over a 40% increase in Google PageSpeed Insight Scores, which analyses the performance of web pages on mobile and desktop devices. These faster speeds have contributed to a 33% increase in customer satisfaction and 16% decrease in the bounce rate.

“We immediately improved page speed after moving into the cloud,” says Ellicott. “This shift boosted our search engine optimisation rankings overnight, increasing our website visits from search by 16% and overall traffic by 48%.”

New website features in a fraction of the time

Bulman and Ellicott also appreciate that the website is easy to update with new features and content to engage visitors, get them excited about fibre, and help them take action.

The Experience Manager Sites implementation streamlined development with fast cloud-based review cycles. The result is that Openreach developers focus more energy on priority projects, like making the fibre availability checker as accurate as possible. The team also understand that customers’ lives change and they may need to reschedule appointments with providers, so they built in the ability to change those appointments directly through Openreach. It now takes just two weeks to bring these types of services online — a process that might previously have taken eight months.

The Openreach team collaborated with development partner NTT Data to build components using out-of-the-box functionality, not complex customisations. The flexible environment makes it easier for authors to create new pages that are always on brand and share with stakeholders. Openreach also regularly updates figures on how many homes have fibre, which previously required manual updates to multiple pages. Today, content authors update a fragment once and the change populates across each page automatically.

“NTT Data is a great development partner that improved our skills so we develop everything right the first time,” says Bulman, who worked with Vipul Bhandari, VP and Client Partner, at NTT DATA UK&I.

"We take great pride in our collaborative partnerships with Openreach to drive technological modernisation," says Bhandari. "Our goal is to optimise and accelerate the pace of value delivery, ensuring that we enable Openreach to achieve faster, more impactful outcomes in today’s increasingly dynamic market."

A foundation to improve every experience

Adoption of Full Fibre across the UK has the potential to transform how people work, connect, stream and play. The digital team also would like to enhance visuals with features such as dynamic media in Adobe Experience Manager Assets and Adobe Creative Cloud integrations to engage customers with richer images. The team then plans to use artificial intelligence to better personalise content for everyone.

“Having the right foundation enables us to be fast and agile,” says Ellicott. “Working with Adobe in the cloud gives us the features to act on our strategies and deliver more value to customers as they enter a new digital age.”