This case was written for the purposes of class discussion, rather than to illustrateeither effective or ineffective handling of a managerial situation. The authors would like to acknowledge and thank the
participants at BT for their contribution to the case study.
© 2010 MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research. All rights reserved to the authors.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sloan School of Management
Center for Information Systems Research
Leveraging the Web for Customer Engagement:
A Case Study of BT’s Debatescape
Social Media and Customer Engagement
Realizing the business value of Web 2.0 technologies
is an uncertain and challenging endeavor
and many organizations are engaging in
a variety of experiments to learn what strategies,
approaches, and applications work and don’t
work, and which may help them generate
sustainable business benefits.1 One such arena
of experimentation is the use of social media to
engage with external customers. Blogger Brian
Solis notes that this application of Web 2.0
technologies reflects the growing recognition
that “social media has slowly evolved not only
as a new content publishing, sharing, and
discovery medium, but more importantly as a
peer-to-peer looking glass into the real world
conversations that affect the perception, engagement,
and overall direction of brands.”2
One way for companies to leverage social media
for customer engagement is to couple social
media with customer relationship management

1
See Wanda Orlikowski and Stephanie Woerner, “Web 2.0:
Experimenting with the Connected Web,” CISR Research
Briefing, Vol. IX, No. 5, May 2009.
2
Brian Solis, “Twitter and Social Networks Usher in a New Era
of Social CRM,” March 20, 2009:
http://www.briansolis.com/2009/03/twitter-and-social-networksusher-in/
(CRM) capabilities. Companies are increasingly
realizing that as interactions within social media
expand (and likely accelerate as the millennial
generation comes of age),3
there is an increased
probability that such interactions will concern
specific company products and services, and be
read by many people around the world. As a
recent article in The New York Times observed,
“A Twitter post can in theory be seen by
millions, and thus packs more punch than an email
message or a phone call to a store.”4
One of the companies on the forefront of
experimenting with social CRM is BT Group plc
(BT), the world’s oldest communications company,
founded as Great Britain’s General Post Office in
1868, and privatized in 1981. Today, BT is one of
the world’s leading providers of communications
solutions and services, operating in more than 170
countries. In this study, we describe BT’s innovation
with social CRM, showing how ongoing
experimentation and careful attention to the

3
Stan Schroeder, “The Web in Numbers: The Rise of Social
Media,” April 17, 2009: http://www.rainierdigital.com/the-webin-numbers-the-rise-of-social-media-mashablecom/
4
Stephanie Rosenbloom and Karen Ann Cullotta, “Buying,
Selling and Twittering All the Way,” The New York Times,
November 27, 2009:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/28/technology/28twitter.html?
_r=1&hpw
Orlikowski and Thompson Page 2 CISR Working Paper No. 380
multiple potentialities of Web 2.0 technologies
can help build a business case for investing in
these technologies to engage with customers.
Using Social CRM at BT
Customer relationship management is a critical
activity for BT Retail, the main line of business
that interacts with direct customers, both
residential customers (BT Consumer) and commercial
ones (BT Business). In the past few
years, Customer Service within BT Retail has
launched a number of initiatives that leverage web
tools to reach customers, including enhanced
website offerings, dedicated discussion forums,
and online community portals. Using web tools
to reach customers is part of a broader vision to
build what Nader Azarmi, BT’s Chief Technologist
for Intelligent Systems Research, calls “the
predictive enterprise.” Such a vision recognizes
that there is considerable intelligence in the
interactions that people are having online in
various communities about the company and its
offerings. This intelligence, as Azarmi notes, “is
very valuable. And we need to somehow understand
and capture and incorporate that into our
decision making and act upon that.”
Aligning with this vision, scientists within BT
Research have been focusing on social media
and recently have developed a customer service
infrastructure—known as Debatescape—that
allows support agents to interact with and assist
customers who are posting on third party forums,
blogs, and Twitter. Debatescape provides a channel
to customers that harnesses Web 2.0 tools to
deliver on BT’s philosophy that it wants to
interact with its customers wherever they are,
with whatever media they are using.
Debatescape was motivated by the realization
that BT was increasingly missing out on an
important aspect of customer contact. Graeme
Stoker (General Manager of Digital Care at BT
Consumer) recalls,
We have come to acknowledge that there
was a lot of discussion about ourselves
and our products and services going on
outside of the BT domain all over the big
bad Internet, and traditionally BT has
been very much of the opinion that if
customers wanted to talk to us, they’d
come to us. And a few of us have—over
the past probably about a year or so—
been trying to force the opinion that
actually, we should be taking ourselves to
where our customers are and therefore
engage with them on their terms and their
preferred location as opposed to waiting
for them to come to us. So we were trying
to find a way to, I guess, firstly, identify
what our customers were saying, and
where they were saying things, and then
secondly, to find a way to interact with
them in those domains, but importantly to
keep all of the interactions manageable
from within a customer service environment
here.
The Debatescape infrastructure was thus designed
to offer service to customers posting to a
variety of social media sites. Two problems had
to be overcome to develop this infrastructure:
the first was to find all of these customers who
were expressing their “pain” on the web and
then focus attention on them; and the second
was to develop a process that operationalized
the problem resolution and made it traceable
and scalable.
The Debatescape technology that was built by a
team within BT Research uses RSS feeds, open
application programming interfaces (APIs), and
content-scraping tools to obtain and pool usergenerated
content from online forums, blogs,
and social networking sites such as Twitter,
Facebook, and YouTube. Using a natural language
analyzer, Debatescape sorts and classifies
the content into various categories, and then
transfers the actionable events to designated
customer service agents in either BT Consumer
or BT Business. These agents then take action
on the customers’ questions or problems and
post their resolutions or responses to Debatescape
which then streams these replies back to
the originating sites with the appropriate BT
credentials (see Exhibit 1).
Debatescape has been running within BT Retail
since February 2009, and as we discuss below,
experiences to date suggest that things have
been going reasonably well. We interviewed
Orlikowski and Thompson Page 3 CISR Working Paper No. 380
key business leaders from both BT Consumer
and BT Business to understand their experiences
so far, and to learn how they justify engaging
with social media in their customer service
operations.
Justifying Social CRM
Based on our interviews, it is apparent that the
business case for investing in social media has
been justified in various ways. To help make
sense of the multiple criteria being used, we
found it useful to categorize these in terms of
the Shareholder Value matrix developed by Hart
and Milstein.5 The matrix is defined by two
dimensions that represent the two primary
tensions faced by any organization: realizing
short-term results while also creating conditions
for future growth; and cultivating core internal
capabilities while also remaining open to fresh
perspectives and emerging technologies from
the outside. These two dimensions produce four
quadrants representing the four distinct performance
elements that are crucial to generating
shareholder value over time: cost, reputation,
innovation, and growth (see Exhibit 2).
Cost
The performance dimensions in the bottom left
quadrant of the matrix focus attention internally
and on near-term results. Business value is
generated through achieving operational efficiencies.
For BT, social CRM represents a
potentially cheaper, easier, and quicker way to
interact with customers. Traditionally, most customer
contact in companies such as BT is via
the voice channel. And servicing customers this
way is expensive. The web based infrastructure
and flexible resourcing model that have been
adopted to facilitate social media support in BT
are perceived to be more efficient by BT, but
quantifying this has proven difficult.
Similarly, reaching out to customers early may
stop them from escalating matters to the
Chairman or CEO. High-level escalation is
considerably more expensive to deal with than

5
See Hart and Milstein “Creating Sustainable Value”
(Academy of Management Executive, Vol. 17, No, 2,
2003: pp. 56–67).
normal complaints, so avoiding such practices
can be particularly valuable.
An additional arena of cost reductions arises
through leveraging responses in social media.
That is, once a customer question has been
answered publicly, others with similar problems
may benefit, thus decreasing overall interactions
with BT service agents. As Jonathan Denison
(General Manager for Systems and Innovation
at BT Business) observed,
The hope is that once you have answered a
question in public, when someone then
searches for the problem using Google, they
may find the answer.
The use of social media in BT is still in trial
mode, but the initial results are promising. In
BT Business, for example, ten weeks of
Debatescape usage has generated an estimated
ROI of 181%; that is, use of the technology has
cost £105K but produced £190K in returns. In
addition, there have been some retention
benefits. Jonathan Denison (BT Business) indicated
that:
We’ve seen quite a bit of evidence of
customers saying they’re going to go to the
competition or they’re really unhappy with
BT and then we’ve surveyed them after
we’ve been in touch with them and helped
resolve the problem, and a lot of customers
are saying that they’re less likely now to
move away from BT, so we think we can
prove a reduction in churn.
These benefits are expected to increase as the
interactions with customers evolve over time.
Jonathan Denison (BT Business) added,
On Twitter for example, we’ve seen a shift
from customers saying things about BT,
and us jumping in to help them, to
customers suggesting to other customers
that they contact us, to then customers,
themselves, just directly coming to us via
the medium. So, it’s changing extremely
quickly.
Orlikowski and Thompson Page 4 CISR Working Paper No. 380
Reputation
This performance dimension in the bottom right
quadrant of the matrix focuses on the near-term,
and concentrates on relations with external
stakeholders such as customers and suppliers.
Without appropriate attention to these stakeholders
and their concerns, the firm’s legitimacy and
efficacy in operating may be challenged. To the
extent that social media sites are increasingly
where customers are showing up and having
discussions about products and services, then
these online forums represent a potentially
serious reputation risk—and opportunity—for
any company.
Recognizing the power of social media to
influence BT’s reputation was a primary influence
in the development of Debatescape, which was
designed to allow BT to participate in online
conversations instead of simply leaving customers
to express negative opinions about BT products or
services publically. The technology was motivated
by a sense that the company’s voice was absent
from the online conversations, and what emerged
was a recognition that BT needs to be part of the
conversations, balancing the debate with their side
of the story. Debatescape was thus designed to be
an engine that facilitates a corporate presence in
the online conversations. As one of the lead
developers of Debatescape explained,
The idea is that we can project an
authentic image of our operations onto
the debate.… We have no ownership on
these debates and we can’t shut them
down, but can we balance the debate with
the real story? … And in fact, if somebody
searches Google, they find all these
incidents where people are simply saying,
‘Well, it’s awful, I can’t get this to work’
and someone from BT is saying, ‘Can I
help?’ and ‘Here’s how I’ll help,’ and that
provides a very powerful message, I think,
of the perception of the company, projecting
authenticity into the debate.
Reputational justification for using social CRM
thus focuses on connecting with external
stakeholders in a way that enhances a company’s
reputation, legitimacy, identity, and brand. It is
increasingly seen as imperative for any business
that provides customer service. Graeme Stoker
(BT Consumer) observed, “We just can’t afford
not to be in this space.” At stake is the perception
of the company and its reputation in the market
place. He explained,
We have to drag ourselves from being,
you know, BT the old-fashioned, traditional,
incumbent telco—big, lots of
customer service problems, the company
everybody likes to bash over the head—to
being a progressive, customer demand-led
organization.
Traditionally, the assumption in customer service
has been that “if customers wanted to talk
to us, they’ll come to us.” But in the light of
social media, this assumption requires some
updating, and BT Consumer has realized that its
reputation can be enhanced by engaging more
directly with its customers on social media sites.
Early results on the BT Consumer side suggest that
positive word of mouth is being generated through
the use of Debatescape. Brooke Molinaroli (Head
of Digital Care Design, BT Retail Customer
Services) reports that to date there have been
approximately 23,000 interactions with customers
using Debatescape over a nine-month period.
Typically the team has been responding within
three to four hours of the original posting. On a
rolling three-month basis, approximately 50% of
these users report being “extremely” to “very
satisfied” with the interaction. Importantly, many
of these users post back to the forums to indicate
their satisfaction, thus helping BT’s brand image.
A recent comment on Twitter noted: “This is great
how good Twitter is; I said I was upset being cut
off & there BT was, wanting to help. Hats off for
BT.” Furthermore, some customers are sharing
their positive experiences on other sites. For
example, a recent posting on silicon.com read:
“The last time I had a problem with my BT
broadband line at home, I mentioned it on Twitter.
Within minutes, BT—which is on Twitter, too—
was asking me about the problem. That’s an
example of great customer service.”6

6
http://www.silicon.com/technology/networks/2009/07/09
/why-your-business-should-use-twitter-39449784/
Orlikowski and Thompson Page 5 CISR Working Paper No. 380
Innovation
This performance dimension in the top left
quadrant of the matrix is focused internally but
concerns longer-term operational effectiveness.
It is intended to help focus attention on the
development of skills, capabilities, and practices
that will ready the firm to perform successfully
in the future. As a new medium of interaction
and one that is growing rapidly in usage and
functionality, social media offer some powerful
and pioneering capabilities that may be harnessed
to improve customer service. Two particularly
interesting and novel characteristics are
the asynchronicity and persistence that come
with the use of social media to do CRM.
Asynchronicity. A disadvantage of the voice
channel is that it requires both the customer and
the service agent to interact synchronously.
With social media, interactions can be managed
asynchronously. Customers can post a problem
on a forum and while they get on with their
lives, the customer service agents can be
resolving their issue. For some customer problems
(e.g., those requiring troubleshooting),
synchronicity will continue to be necessary, but
for a large number of other issues or queries,
customers’ time may be freed up when they use
social media to engage with service centers.
Persistence. As interactions on social media sites
are textual, an automatic record of each interaction
exchanged between a customer and a service
agent is generated and archived. Such ongoing
documentation of online conversations produces a
visible, searchable, growing, and persistent
repository of questions and resolutions, while also
increasing the transparency and thus the
accountability of all the parties involved in the
conversations.
Growth
This performance dimension in the top right
quadrant of the matrix is focused on the future
and looks externally to a firm’s relations with its
various outside stakeholders. It seeks to identify
the growth trajectory that will allow the firm to
move into new markets, build new products and
technologies, and develop new relations with
(potentially different) customers and suppliers.
For BT, social media offer the potential to be an
important new channel through which the
company can learn about its customers, build
loyalty, and grow sales. Jonathan Denison (BT
Business) observed,
We definitely feel as if engagement with
customers and trying to find different
ways to engage with customers both from
a sales point of view and from a
marketing point of view and the one-toone
nature of the social media stuff is
going to grow and will become increasingly
important.
Such growth is likely to be slow as the majority
of BT Retail customers are still interacting with
the company via the telephone. But increasingly
the company is encouraging its customers to use
the BT website, to access FAQs, to use the
online BT forums, and to chat online with customer
agents. Customers engaging with BT
online are also the customers that are likely to
engage with the company through Debatescape.
Over time, the number of customers who will
seek customer support through online forums
and social media is likely to increase, and by
investing in Debatescape and online customer
service agent skills at this early stage, BT is
positioning the company to be ready to engage
with many more customers via a range of
different social media sites in the future.
Challenges of Social CRM
Working with social media has proven to be
somewhat challenging, largely because this is a
new way of working and interacting with customers,
and effective norms, practices, and
assessment criteria are still unsettled and being
defined. Four primary challenges were evident
in our interviews with the managers at BT: skills
and mindset; speed and visibility; unpredictability
and vulnerability; and system growth
and status.
Skills and Mindset
Given the public and textual nature of social
media, the skills and mindset required by
service agents dealing with customers in this
novel way will have to change. New practices
Orlikowski and Thompson Page 6 CISR Working Paper No. 380
and norms of interaction more appropriate for
the new medium have to be developed. Jonathan
Denison (BT Business) explained,
The main hurdles have really been around
getting our advisors to the right way of
thinking. So, understanding the style and
tone to use and understanding the language
that’s most appropriate for the
medium, that’s been the biggest challenge
because we’ve come from a very stable
environment. … So much is different. I
mean the obvious thing is just the style of
the conversation. A lot of companies had
a very formal customer service culture…
whereas in this kind of medium, people
just expect it to be fast and kind of quick
and short but friendly and also human.
Another set of issues concerns cross-training
and being multi-skilled. Online customer service
agents tend to need more general expertise than
specialist knowledge. As Graeme Stoker (BT
Consumer) observed,
Given the nature of what we’re doing [on
Debatescape], the [agents] have to be
jacks of all trades. Whatever the customer’s
problem is, they need to be able to
pick it up, take ownership of it, and
resolve it.”
Similarly, Jonathan Denison (BT Business)
noted,
And you’re also making sure that the
advisors are really trained to be able to
counter anything that comes their way…
Whether it’s a query about the broadband
product or a PR query or a general enquiry
about their bill, we need to make sure that
the team is equipped to handle that in the
most appropriate way. So that’s been a big
difference.
Speed and Visibility
Interacting on social media is very public and
tends to be rapid, so the expectations of speed
and responsiveness, as well as tone of voice and
politeness become accentuated and exacerbated.
Jonathan Denison (BT Business) commented,
I think what is new as well is just how quick
it is. And it’s also very, very upfront, do you
know what I mean? You’re there and
sometimes it’s very public when people are
saying things… As you know, social media
is one of those things where bad things go
viral very quickly, so you sort of have to
have more impetus and that does put a
different kind of pressure on the situation.
Graeme Stoker (BT Consumer) similarly
observed that “As volumes have grown, we’ve
really had to make sure that an important piece
is just sort of the whole speed and responsiveness.
In other channels, [the response] ‘Let
me pass you on to someone else or I’ll get back
to you later, or I’ll phone you tomorrow’ may
work, but that doesn’t really cut it [in social
media].”
Unpredictability and Vulnerability
A third challenge mentioned by the BT managers
in managing social CRM is the unpredictability of
the workflow and the vulnerability that comes
from working in a new and relatively unproven
way. Jonathan Denison (BT Business) explained,
One of the things which my operational
colleagues have found difficult is the
unpredictability of it. So, if you think about
it, we’ve come from an environment which
has been stable over many years—we know
exactly when calls/emails are going to come
in; we know when they’ll peak; we know
exactly how we need to resource it; we
know exactly what coverage we need, at
what time of what day, etc., etc., etc.—to
something which is completely unknown
and that really has unsettled our operational
management colleagues. … And all
these things that you do in call centers and
in customer service environments, all of a
sudden the rulebook’s been thrown out the
window.”
With respect to vulnerability, the BT Consumer
staff recently encountered firsthand the
“bleeding-edge” of contemporary social media
when they discovered that one of the social
networking sites that that was being used to
interact with customers had suspended BT’s
Orlikowski and Thompson Page 7 CISR Working Paper No. 380
account. Brooke Molinaroli (BT Retail Customer
Services) noted,
You quickly realize how vulnerable and
fragile this whole thing is. So basically, it
was about 6:30 on Wednesday night, and
we’re making our plans to leave, and all
of a sudden one of the advisors said, ‘Oh
my God, Brooke, come here, come here.’
And she clicked on the social media site
and basically it said, ‘We have suspended
your account due to suspicious activity.’
As it turned out, this suspension had been an
error made on the side of the social media site
and BT’s account was restored in under a day.
But not before this error had produced considerable
anxiety within BT Consumer, generating
many hours of frantic activity through the night
trying to reach the social media site’s employees
so that they would restore the account.
This incident highlights the tenuous nature of
current social CRM technology. Debatescape
operates on a cloud infrastructure that BT does
not control or own. For BT managers to suddenly
realize that they have no input or
influence over the operation of a critical part of
their service infrastructure is a real culture
shock. BT has no SLAs with social media sites
that are a core part of the service it is running.
Some of the social media sites that Debatescape
relies on do not have contact centers or people
to call that can provide 24/7 support. This
increases BT’s exposure and risk.
Graeme Stoker (BT Consumer) observed another
vulnerability having to do with customer interaction
on social media sites, one akin to customer
poaching. He explained,
One of our competitors started seeing the
customers that we were posting to, where
they were saying that they were having
problems with our service, and one of our
competitors started writing to them and
trying to encourage them to move over to
them.… Our reaction was ‘That’s interesting.
How do we respond to that?’ In the
end we decided not to respond. We just
carried on and tried to satisfy the
customers and decided not to do the same
to their customers… It didn’t fit with our
brand image.”
System Growth and Status
Finally, a significant challenge currently being
experienced by the Debatescape team is how to
scale the system and transition it from pilot status
to operational system. Initially, Debatescape and
social CRM at BT were seen as part of the
experimental innovation activity that BT, like
many large companies, invests in within its
corporate R&D program. However, the system
rapidly became perceived as ‘business as usual’
for the staff managing and executing customer
care through its channel. As dependence on the
system grew, the expectations of performance
and reliability also developed. When the
Debatescape trial was started, it was possible to
take the system down for an upgrade and most
of the users barely noticed the interruption. After
six months, if the system becomes unresponsive
because of excessive load or becomes unavailable
at any time of the day or night, the users notice
right away and start complaining within minutes.
The growth and scale of such systems pose a
couple of implications that require careful
consideration.
First, functionality that is introduced into a
system during its trial phase in the belief that it
would be used occasionally and out of normal
operational hours can become critical to the
actual operation of the system. The customer
contact centers that introduced Debatescape had
well-established patterns of shift work and a 24/7
culture, and Debatescape was rapidly appropriated
into this way of working. This meant effectively
that there were no “off hours” for additional functionality
as operations were necessarily impacted
as a result. For example, running reports and
doing backups within Debatescape both caused
problems in this regard, imposing either
substantial database overhead (in the case of
system reporting) or substantial bandwidth overhead
(in the case of backups). Second, a pilot
team that is not funded to provide 24/7 coverage
can quickly become overstretched in the alwayson
social media world. Debatescape achieved
99.36% availability during its first nine months of
Orlikowski and Thompson Page 8 CISR Working Paper No. 380
operation, but despite this there were many
complaints about outages and slow response
times.
Transitioning an experimental pilot system to
operational status can be very difficult as the
final requirements and shape of the system are
necessarily unknown at the start of the
development. In the case of social media, there
was an explosion of interest that generated a
wave of support leading to systems such as
Debatescape. Some social media systems have
clear revenue generation propositions and companies
find they can easily fund and support
such systems through the revenues produced.
Cost saving and customer service initiatives,
however, are more difficult to manage and
justify as it takes time for their contributions to
be visible and accessible to the organization.
And where such initiatives are unexpectedly
heavily utilized, additional funding may be
needed sooner than anticipated. Corporate funding
for innovation activities are often fully
allocated within a particular reporting period, thus
more money can often only be found at the cost of
stopping other activities. Yet, underfunding an
innovative pilot can compromise its potential
success and undercut the lessons learned from the
initiative.
As the opportunities and environment around
Debatescape have evolved, so have BT’s plans for
it. At the time of writing, there are a number of
options under consideration such as integrating the
system into the corporate infrastructure, selling the
intellectual property rights to a third party, or
licensing it to a third party. Even as these
opportunities are being deliberated, the team
running Debatescape is still required to deliver
effective 24/7 service with the resources that
were allocated when the activity began. How to
effectively transition from experimental pilot
status to a fully-supported system without disrupting
the value currently being generated is
thus a significant challenge.
Conclusion
While BT is continuing to learn from its initial
implementation of Debatescape, the focus, design,
operations, and results offer interesting and
important insights into the business opportunities
and challenges of using social media to interact
directly with customers. In particular, the initiative
we have described here suggests that social media
have the potential to provide business benefits
along all four of the dimensions of shareholder
value—cost, reputation, innovation, and growth.
Of course, the emergent nature of Web 2.0 technologies,
the rising demographic of “digital
natives” (the millennial generation), and the press
of shifting business practices suggest that these
benefits will change over time. There is considerable
evolution and change likely in this
space for some time, so experimenting with
social media and learning how to effectively
leverage the web for customer engagement must
be ongoing.
Orlikowski and Thompson Page 9 CISR Working Paper No. 380
Exhibit 1
Architecture of Debatescape
Exhibit 2
Shareholder Value Framework (from Hart and Milstein, 2003)
Innovation
Cost Reputation
Growth
Shareholder
Value
Today
Tomorrow
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