BCE aiming for simplicity in its drive to offer customers bundled services: Sabia

BCE Inc. president/CEO Michael Sabia says that the company will have to cut red tape on its drive to provide its customers with bundled services, running the spectrum from telephone service to Internet access to TV programming. The company has to simplify and the bureaucracy that gets in the way "must go. And it will go," he said November 4 during a speech at the Canadian Club of Toronto. Below is an excerpt from his speech. …We live in a knowledge society. We work in a knowledge economy. And every day we rely on communications networks to link this all together – to make it all possible. There is no doubt that the last two or three years in the communications sector have been a wild ride. We rose to unrealistic heights based on overly optimistic expectations. Then the inevitable happened: markets broke and we plunged just as quickly and steeply down. ...The future? Highly suspect. But what we saw was neither the failure of innovative technologies nor the collapse of consumer demand for communications services. What we saw was the vulnerability of business models driven by unbridled exuberance, with too little financial discipline. Too much capital chasing far too few true business opportunities. We’ve seen this before...Yes, in the short term, our industry faces many challenges, but despite the headlines, the foundations are solid…For the industry has significant challenges to address. The need to reduce costs. The scramble for every dollar of revenue. Tremendous pressure to curtail our capital spending. And volatile capital markets. At BCE, we ...also see broader and compelling opportunities for the future…Our task? Harness our capabilities to provide simple integrated communications solutions for our customers. Sophisticated products. Simple to use. Simply delivered. No company in North America can offer that today. But at BCE we have the tools, the assets, the platforms to create it. And we’re on our way toward establishing ourselves as something unique in the market, with capabilities that are simply unprecedented anywhere on the continent. Voice, your office phone, your home phone, your cell phone. Data, with high-speed Internet and broadband services. Video through satellite TV. The most advanced business services available. Fully managed network services. Applications for e-commerce. Tools to personalize and streamline information. All offered under one of North America’s most trusted brands. Our goal is to take this great breadth and use it to build on the cornerstone of our future growth – our 24 million customer connections. …Today, we have a vast array of products. We’re moving to simplify those so that the majority of what we sell fits within well defined packages or bundles. Example: Voice and Internet services easily packaged at a single price to ensure you’re connected at all times...And we’re driving a focus on customer segments. Developing powerful service bundles targeted to specific needs…Knowing the customer will also enable targeted contact strategies. And new opportunities to sell across our business units. And believe me there is opportunity there. Today, only one customer in 100 buys all four of our major services from us. We believe we can increase that significantly. Our goal is to build a company that can offer its customers a single point of contact, a person who is a knowledgeable, professional, equipped to guide a client to the choices that create simplicity. We will build a company that respects your time constraints and will meet you at your convenience. We will build a company that can give its customers the option of a single monthly statement detailing all of the services they receive from us. …This will require much change. But since becoming CEO of BCE, I have seen a real willingness among employees to embrace change and move the company in a new direction…Our people understand more and more clearly that bureaucracy is the enemy of service. That it gets in the way of getting the job done. Bureaucracy must go. And it will. Today, every business plan in every one of our units includes concrete initiatives to simplify processes and speed up decision making. Through these initiatives, we are instilling the business discipline, the excellence in execution that we need to sustain our place as a North American leader, at the centre of a sector with a promising future.

BCE aiming for simplicity in its drive to offer customers bundled services: Sabia

News | 11/07/2002 5:00 am EST

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