BT’s purpose is as simple as it is ambitious: to use the power of communications to make a better world. Our business model is centred around providing our customers with communications and connectivity services, while delivering great experiences and maintaining long- term relationships. Irrespective if this is in BT, EE, Plusnet or Openreach, our ambition is to meet the needs of our 26.8 million consumer customers, 1.1 million UK business customers and 4,100 multinational customers. To do this we have to have a diverse employee base that reflects our customers and build brilliant data and insight capabilities to understand the customers needs. The way our customers see the world and our role in their lives and businesses is changing and BT is also changing to meet these.
Our partnership with Women in Data is one of the ways that we can show people the exciting work we’re doing to put data at the heart of our decision making and to ensure our people reflect our customers. Particularly in the data space, achieving a diverse balance of people in our teams is critical, because data is the foundation stone of everything we should be doing as a business.
Name: Georgie White
Job Title: Group Insight Director
As the Group Insight Director at BT, Georgie’s remit is to ensure we put the customer at the heart of decision making across BT and our brands. Georgie joined BT in February 2018 to establish an Insight Centre of Excellence that serves all parts of BT and ensures that customer and data is at the heart of the company strategy and purpose, driving our decision making. This means that we use multiple data sources to build a deep understanding of customers’ needs, democratise insight, ensure it’s in the hands of the decision makers and create new insights leveraging brilliant tools and also help teams across BT self-serve, and understand how to apply insight and data.
Georgie loves engaging with people, understanding them and their agendas and challenges, building relationships to ensure that we create brilliant solutions that drive value to customers and the business. However, at the heart of it, she simply loves helping people become the best they can be (and want to be!) and is a proud advocate of Diversity and Inclusion. Prior to BT, Georgie has worked at brands such as Centrica, Capital One, Merrill Lynch and HBOS, in roles covering Insight, Data and Commercial within both B2C and B2B environments. She lives in Bedfordshire with her husband Neil, 2 crazy dogs and is godmother or ‘aunt’ to lots of wonderful (and sometimes not so wonderful) children.
Name: Joanne Hindmarsh
Job Title: Operational Data Specialist
Expertise: Journey Analytics, Data Visualisation
Education: Economics BSc
Joanne has worked in contact centres for almost twenty years, (14 at BT) in roles ranging from Resource Planning, Operational Management, Business Intelligence and Reporting and Analysis.
Data has been at the heart of all of these roles.
Joanne’s passion for quality data and drive for positive change have delivered some key tools and technologies into the business.
As part of a business improvement project, the creation of a ‘contacts to resolution’ measure led to Joanne leading the design and build of BT Consumer Journey Analytics Model.
This was a combination of prebuilt dashboards and self-serve capability that went on to win industry awards.
Now Operational Data Specialist in BT Enterprise, Joanne’s role sees the development of the equivalent model in that area. Alongside this is the design and construction of a bespoke, multi-source database which will provide a ‘one truth’ view of key metrics across all directorates within BT Enterprise. This database, teamed with the newly acquired Tableau Server will facilitate impactful data visualisation to drive business decisioning.
Joanne believes this is the best time it has ever been to be involved in data within BT – the support, talent and technology available now is better than ever before.
Name: Ginoth Chandrakumar
Job Title: Data Manager, Data Management
Expertise: Data, Data & Data! Ensuring businesses are using high quality, timely, accurate, advanced, analysed and fit for purpose data and using the data in the right way
Education: BEng in Computer Science and Engineering (First class with distinction), MSc in Information Systems, MSc in Database Systems (Distinction)
Ginoth’s passion for data was born from her school days in Sri Lanka. After achieving her Bachelor of Engineering in India, she moved to the UK to further her studies in Data and has since been working as a data professional in the UK Data Industry.
Ginoth is currently working as a Data Manager within the Data & Decisioning team at BT Consumer. Here, she strives to offer the best possible data to BT’s Consumer functions to drive company-wide recommendations, and help the company achieve their vision of being market leaders for both network and customer service.
EE and BT have a wide range of data sources, from online all the way to their call centres, and it’s one of Ginoth’s main responsibilities to filter through all this data and supply high quality recommendations to inform marketing campaigns. For Ginoth, this involves sourcing, cleansing and providing various data forms from multiple systems to the data scientists and/or decisioning teams, to help EE and BT target the right people, with the right message, at the right time.
With an ability to see the bigger picture and make the links between the business and data in each of her day-to-day tasks, Ginoth challenges conventional thinking in Data, helping EE and BT constantly tailor the data-business relationship.
Ginoth always recognises that she always has more to learn and contribute and believes at BT, her passion for data is not only empowered and supported, but rewarded too.
Name: Leana Kielkowicz
Job Title: Head of Decisioning, Data & Decisioning
Expertise: Using data, analytics and real time context to deliver 1-2-1 customer sales experiences, consistently across multiple channels
Leana has worked in the telecommunications industry for the past 15 years (13 in EE) and most of her career has centred around 1-2-1 customer decisioning and sales journey personalisation. Leana specialises in applying data, analytics and machine learning to tailor experiences for individual customers. With the growing expectation from EE and BT’s customers to anticipate and meet their needs, applying science to the decisions they make to stay both competitive and relevant, is more important than ever before.
When Leana started her career at EE all those years ago she did not have a degree or Masters but through hard work and determination, coupled with support & guidance from some strong female technical leaders, she worked her way up the organisation to get where she is today. Today, Leana takes pride in creating the same opportunities for all members of her team and uses herself as an example that anything is possible if you have the drive and ambition.
Data plays a critical part in ensuring that BT is going above and beyond in providing the best experiences for our customers, regardless of how, where and when they choose to interact with us.
We’re already seeing a big shift to the cloud, that not only enables us to bring together data more quickly but also gives us the scalability and elasticity that we need to be able to create real time personal experiences for our customers. That shift to being more personal is only going to accelerate. Alongside data privacy considerations and an awareness of how data is being used, will also come more and more to the forefront of customer experiences. Getting more and more data (and the right data!) into the hands of our people – with the right training and development to be able to use it to unearth insight – is also going to accelerate, creating a truly data and customer centric environment for our organisation.
