Meet BT Singapore: Finalists for Customer Service Provider of the Year and Sustainability Champion of the Year in our Annual Business Awards

What's made them Finalists

Harnessing technology to create a better customer experience, ease customer pain points and aid decarbonsation, BT Singapore has found effective ways of utilizing tech resources to create platforms that are truly customer centric while fostering strong sustainability values with their suppliers through leading the charge with their own comprehensive sustainability efforts.  

Harnessing Technology to Address Customer Pain Points 

Committed to building customer centric solutions, BT Singapore have taken the time the time to recognise and acknowledge important customer pain points in today's business landscape, offering a range of tech based tools and digital transformation solutions such as cloud services, cybersecurity solutions, and data analytics to help businesses modernise their operations and enhance efficiency. 

To help businesses tackle the increasing frequency of sophisticated cyber threats, BT Singapore invested in cutting-edge security solutions and consulting services, offering customers cybersecurity services to help safeguard their digital assets and data. The increasingly globalised nature of teams as well as the shifts in workplace culture with the rise of remote working has also led to tools such as video conferencing and unified communications becoming crucial to businesses maintaining connectivity and productivity. To address this, BT Singapore has been developing and providing collaborative tools to facilitate remote working and business communication. 

Their customer service efforts also include initiatives to aid customers with their sustainability goals and targets, enabling them to securely connect their operations for energy and carbon savings:

• The launch of two digital tools in 2022 - the ‘Digital Carbon Calculator’ and ‘Carbon Network Dashboard’ to help customers measure, monitor and reduce the energy and carbon footprint for their ICT devices The Digital Carbon Calculator scans the customer’s network inventory to estimate its carbon footprint. It includes lifecycle management, highlighting devices at the end of service to prioritise for replacement.
   
• The Carbon Network Dashboard gives a real-time view of power consumption and uses machine learning to detect and predict anomalies based on historic usage. Customers can forecast total energy use based on their network inventory and historic utilisation. To help understand how electricity consumption translates into carbon emissions, the Dashboard includes data from regional power grids showing their carbon intensity. 
   
• In partnership with Cisco, BT Singapore have launched a takeback programme which enables BT customers recycle their end-of-service networking devices for free for reuse or recycling. They have helped customers avoid over 935,000 tonnesCO2, mainly through full fibre broadband and reducing personal or work-related travel.

Sustainability Efforts and Supplier Engagement 

Striving to only buy products and services from responsible companies – suppliers are required to meet the orgainsations sustainability standards and they monitor risks and compliance through assessments and audits.

Partnering with suppliers to curb emissions, BT Singapore introduced a climate clause for some of their key suppliers – committing them to make measurable carbon savings during the period of their contract with them. They track compliance through supplier assessments and encourage suppliers to join them in reporting climate-related data to the CDP to enhance visibility, transparency and accountability. Today more than 200 of their suppliers are engaging in this. In recognition of their supplier engagement efforts this year, they retained their position in CDP’s Supplier Engagement Leaderboard for the sixth year in a row. These initiatives include: 

• Applying a 15% weighting to buying decisions based on sustainability and related criteria.
• Requiring suppliers with new contracts over £25m to set science-based net zero targets.
• Implementing sustainability contract clauses with key suppliers.
•  Continue engaging with other organisations such as our own trade associations, 1.5°C Supply Chain Leaders, and the SME Climate Hub and CDP.

Recycling, Nature and Biodiversity 

Having successfully transitioned to using 100% renewable electricity worldwide, they have reduced the carbon emission intensity of their operations by 57% since 2016-2017. In 2023, they cut their global energy consumption by a further 77 GWh compared to the previous year. 

Their recycling initiatives have led to customers returning  more than 1.8 million home hubs and set-top boxes to them. Through their refurbishment operation they reused 83% and recycled the rest. They also collected over 190,000 mobile devices through consumer and business trade-in schemes, all reused or recycled.

As part of their efforts to protect nature and biodiversity, BT Singapore ran a pilot this year to explore their impact on nature, in line with the draft Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures framework.