BT Retail

BT Retail is the consumer and small business sales arm of Britain's BT Group.

BT Retail is responsible for selling consumer services such as PSTN, BT Total Broadband, BT Vision, and business networks and telephony services to businesses. BT Retail itself buys many of these services from BT Wholesale, BT Global Services and Openreach. It also sells other vendor's products and services such as the Avaya IP Office business telephone system.

A subsection of BT Retail is BT Business. This is the part of the business that sells its services to the UK's small to medium enterprise market. BT Business operates both a direct and indirect sales channel. Its direct customers are managed from one of eight service centres across the UK. These include its offices in Brentwood, Sevenoaks, Telephone House Sheffield and Skelmersdale.

There are 18 indirect sales channel partners that can sell BT Business products and services too. These partners are usually smaller, experienced IT and communications technology suppliers. There are two levels of partnership available, either ‘Authorised Partner of BT’ status or ‘Reseller for BT’. Authorised partners receive a commission, similar to a finder’s fee, from BT Business for selling its products and services. The customer still receives a bill from the company and contracts directly with BT Business.

BT.com, BT's customer facing website, is the easiest and most used point of contact between BT and its customers.

BT Wholesale had 12.7m broadband end users of which BT Retail's share was 35% at the end 31 March 2008.

BT Retail revenues were up 2% year ending 31 March 2008. It remains the UK's number one retail broadband provider winning 30% of market additions (DSL and LLU) in the quarter.