BT Group drives its communications strategy using AI-powered insights combined with human intelligence to provide a 360-degree view of external stakeholder opinion
“We get a lot of important data from the insights provided by the monthly reports, but we strive to have the big picture, and the Onclusive team is very helpful in achieving this.”
Corporate Affairs Insight Manager, BT
About BT Group
BT Group is one of the world’s leading communications service providers, and its solutions are integral to modern life. With over 30 million private customers and 1 million corporate and government customers in the UK alone and operations in 180 countries worldwide, BT is a truly global company with diverse external stakeholders.
Challenge and objectives
The partnership between BT Group and Onclusive is long-standing, covering the full range of media monitoring and reputation analysis tools. The Corporate Affairs team asked us to help them develop a solution that could more accurately determine how different stakeholder audiences viewed and perceived – spontaneously – the company. BT wanted to derive information from this to make data-driven decisions about future communications and strategy. A solution was needed that would provide these insights in a standardized format. Specifically, BT wanted to determine:
- How key audiences were saying about the company
- What sentiment lay behind the statements of each stakeholder group
- How specific topics and news had an impact on stakeholder sentiment
- How the company performed compared to its competitors in these areas
- How stakeholders assessed the company’s reputation
Why Onclusive?
“Onclusive offers just the right level of expertise alongside AI-powered media analysis . . . The team provides excellent support. They understand our tasks and requests and always respond very quickly.”
Corporate Affairs Insight Manager, BT
Our strategy and approach
Working with the BT Corporate Affairs team, we developed a market research solution that combines AI-powered media analysis with the in-depth knowledge of our experienced consultants. This created a long-term approach to reputation management across key stakeholder and opinion leader groups, as well as planning and measuring campaigns and monitoring key issues.
We distilled the company’s requirements into three themes:
- Identify what matters
- Identify the external voices BT wants to pay particular attention to: politicians, industry bodies and other influencers
- Segment all content by type of commenting stakeholder
- Align metrics with BT’s Corporate Affairs team objectives and campaigns and the company’s strategic vision
- Create an impact score to measure the visibility and importance of each commenter based on potential readership, brand placement and sentiment
- Create a meaningful comparison between external stakeholders and with competitors
- Assess the influence of different commenters on opinion and sentiment formation based on the importance and reach of their conversations
- Create a benchmark for direct comparison with key competitors
- Provide a central overview of long and short-term reputation trends for each company, with the ability to drill down into each stakeholder group
- Design an insightful and clear Report
- Leverage BT Group’s internal and external branding and design to ensure buy-in from internal stakeholders
Design a template that is relevant and easy to understand for all BT Group teams and allows the data to be broken down in different ways
The results
With detailed monthly reports and a dedicated team of consultants at Onclusive, BT Group can:
- Understand the precise impact that specific news about the company has on sentiment across key stakeholder groups
- Make informed communications decisions based on up-to-date stakeholder sentiment analysis
- Gain an overview of how stakeholders feel about the company’s reputation
- Understand how BT Group compares to its competitors
“We can now understand the sentiment of stakeholders around specific issues and stories about the company and use that insight to make strategic decisions about what we should – or shouldn’t – do. Often it is just as important to know what we shouldn’t do. Having a full view of the true sentiment of stakeholders, combined with our other media monitoring data, helps us decide whether we should continue to be reactive or be more proactive.”
Corporate Affairs Insight Manager, BT