British Telecom Case Study

ServiceView Web Site Development

Company Profile

British Telecommunications plc (BT) is one of the world's leading providers of telecommunications services and one of the largest private sector companies in Europe. Its principal activities include local, long distance and international telecommunications services, mobile communications, Internet services and IT solutions.

Business Requirements

In order to become one of the leading telecommunications companies involved in e-commerce via the Internet, BT had established a ServiceView web site providing customers with information about BT’s products and services. In addition, the site also provided access to a private and secure virtual Shared Workspace where individual customers and BT’s account teams could share access to documents such as contact lists, diaries, site plans, network diagrams, meeting minutes, service plans and project plans. The Shared Workspace contained collaborative software, shared document access and contact management facilities. The ServiceView web site forms an integral part of BT’s e-commerce strategy by providing their customers with better information, easier communication to Customer Services, global access, and a higher degree of process automation.

BT had a requirement to increase the power and flexibility of the web site and Shared Workspace by adding more applications and functionality, including transactional capability allowing customers to perform business transactions with BT’s internal systems.

Our Solution

Beacon developed a close relationship with BT and worked as an extension of their new BT development team to provide on-going development and support of the web site infrastructure and applications. We undertook key development for the Shared Workspace including automation of the Internet administration, log-on and secure access, user homepage customisation, and improved contact management features such as conference calling and Internet meetings.

We developed various e-commerce features such as Order Status (enabling customers to view progress of their orders via the web site), Order Placement (including a simple order form and transactional order placement), and Order Management (offering support for customising and placing multiple and repeat orders).

Other facilities included problem reporting and problem status, a ‘call me’ feature enabling customers to contact a BT party immediately, a ‘message of the day’ feature, and a cost allocation tool enabling customers to allocate parts of bills to different cost centres within their organisations.