Coronavirus: Keeping your business connected

We’re working hard to keep the nation connected. That’s why we’ve introduced new products, offers and free resources. All designed to make things that little bit easier for our businesses.

Best ways to stay in touch during the coronavirus pandemic

My Account

It’s simple to manage your BT service yourself online and in the BT Business app. And with our call centres busier than usual, self service is likely to be the fastest way to update your details.

Here are just a few of the things that you can do in My Account:

View and download your bills
Check your usage
View any out of allowance costs
Report and track orders and faults

Help online

Looking for a quick answer? We have lots of frequently asked questions, articles, videos and user guides online to help you.

Here are some in particular that could help you during coronavirus:

How do I forward/direct calls from my business phone?

How do I find information about my bill?

How do I raise a fault with my broadband or phone line?

Going abroad? Get ready before you go - read the latest UK Government guidance for travel during the coronavirus pandemic

Livechat

We’ve expanded our live chat team, and we’re ready to help Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm.

With our call centres busier than usual, please use live chat if you’re looking to contact us.

The networks to support working from home

With home working increasing hugely in response to COVID-19, you need to be confident you can keep connected. There’s more than enough capacity in our UK broadband and mobile networks to handle the demand. Here’s why.

Our network is built to accommodate evening peak network capacity, which is driven by data-heavy things like video streaming and game downloads, for example.

In comparison, work-related applications like video calls and daytime email traffic use only a fraction of the data. Even if the same heavy data traffic that we see each evening were to run throughout the daytime, there’s still enough capacity for work applications to run simultaneously.

How our partners have adapted to remote working

Samsung

Paul Harris of Samsung talks about our partnership supporting the NHS and transforming ways of working.

RingCentral

BT’s Fotis Karonis in conversation with RingCentral’s Sunny Dhami, on remote working, digital transformation and more.

Cisco

Fotis Karonis chats with Mark Needham of Cisco on the positive impact remote working can have within an organisation.

Expert support to help your business through coronavirus

How to effectively manage remote teams

Practical tips and tools to help your team collaborate effectively, keep up productivity, and feel valued too.

Read remote teams article

How to work from home effectively

A practical guide. Five top tips on working from home – based on experiences of BT’s homeworkers.

Read home working article

The balanced technology diet for business

Dr Nicola Millard, our Principal Innovation Partner, is exploring the challenges of constant connection. She’s come up with some top tips to help you manage the techno-stresses of everyday life.

Read communications diet article

Productivity in the modern workplace

Dr Millard offers insights into future workplace trends, and highlights how you can adapt and innovate.

Read future working article

Learn from home with online events

Build digital skills at home with our Skills for Tomorrow training. Why not sign up for our next webinar today?

Remote working security guide

A three-stage approach to protect your business working from home. Find out how to turn on the human firewall.

Read remote security guide

Business networking solutions

Keep your company’s data secure while working remotely. And build networks that deliver under pressure.

Read networking solutions article

Digital skills help our customers adapt

MobGroup

Live-streaming is just one of the ways of staying connected with your customers. Discover how MobGroup moved from workplace wellness to remote workouts to keep their customers working out during coronavirus.

We’ve created free digital training resources to help businesses go digital, with a wide range of courses to choose from.

Heaps + Stacks

Events company Heaps + Stacks adapted its business model to meet, and beat, the challenges of coronavirus. Thanks to out-of-the-box thinking and new digital skills, Heaps + Stacks found new income streams and is thriving.

View the full article and if you’re inspired by what Heaps + Stacks achieved, we can help you transform your business too.

Your Live Guide

Social media live streams have become a saviour for keeping people entertained recently. Discover how Chloé jumped on the trend and used her digital skills to bring Your Live Guide to life. A platform to make it easier for people around the globe to find live streams they love.

Read the full article and discover what your digital skills could help you achieve.

How our IP voice products help with home working

Use your landline number on a mobile app

Most of BT's IP voice products come with applications that can work on your mobile phone or desktop. This means as long as you have a good 4G or wi-fi connection you can make and receive calls when you’re away from the office using an app on your mobile.

All calls to customers within your organisation are free. Calls outside of your organisation to a landline or mobile will be charged according to your current call plan.

Here are our IP voice apps and how you can download them:

BT Cloud Phone (for Cloud Work and Cloud Phone)

BT Cloud Voice Express

BT Cloud Voice Communicator (for BT Cloud Voice)

BT One Phone

Take your IP phone home

If you have BT Cloud Phone, Cloud Voice Express, Cloud Voice, Cloud Work or One Phone, you can take your IP enabled handset to a different location and it will work as normal. IP handsets work over the internet so rather than plugging the device into the landline port in your home, you will need to plug it into your broadband hub. IP devices generally need 500Kbps or more to work, so if you have fibre broadband you should be fine.

Note: If you need to call 999 it’s better to use a mobile or home phone. If using your IP phone, you must give the operator your location.

How Cloud Voice can help with remote working

Check your home broadband speed

Collaboration apps for meetings

You can use these apps to collaborate by video and screen shares, both within and outside your organisation. Thanks to support from RingCentral, we’re upgrading our Cloud Phone and Cloud Work customers to have more collaboration tools for free. We’ll email you when we’ve upgraded your service. If you need collaboration apps immediately, please call our sales teams.

And for all of our customers who need collaboration tools, we’re offering free access to Cisco Webex. You can sign up on our Cisco Webex page today.

Video and presence applications use up more of your internet and VPN bandwidth than just surfing the internet or making calls. If things start slowing down, you may wish to manage bandwidth by reducing streaming to give you a better service on things you need most.

Here’s where to get help and support with the collaboration apps available with BT IP voice products:

Call forwarding

You can set call forwards to re-route your calls to your mobile. This may be the best option if you don’t have good broadband connectivity.

More support on our help pages

Here are some useful links to help you make the most of your BT voice product:

Working from home - your checklist

If you need to work from home or help your people to do so, here are some key things to think about:

Is there suitable connectivity at home, such as a broadband line?
Is there security in place to dial in remotely into systems outside your corporate LAN or WAN?
Likewise, is there security and protection for your equipment?
Are any data backup or storage facilities needed to work effectively from home?
What will you use to make calls – devices or Skype, for example?
Do you need communication tools such as a headset or video camera?
Do you have the collaboration tools including the right licenses and quality of service?

We can help with connectivity , extra bandwidth , security, digital phone lines and business grade licenses for conferencing services. Plus you can find out more about our collaboration services and offers in the ‘home working’ and ‘special benefits’ sections.

Special benefits for IP voice customers during the coronavirus outbreak

For all our IP voice customers

Free access to Cisco Webex for audio and video calls

For all of our customers who need collaboration tools, we’re offering free access to Cisco Webex. You can sign up on our Cisco Webex page today.

For BT Cloud Phone and BT Cloud Work customers

Free video and web conferencing with the BT Cloud Phone Meetings app until 30 June 2020

We’re giving the Cloud Phone Meetings app free to all customers with Basic or Connect licences. With the app, you’ll get free access to audio, video and web conferencing (for up to 100 participants) from your mobile, tablet or PC until 30 June. So you, your team and your customers can stay connected at home and when working remotely.

If you’re a Basic user, simply download the app and use your Cloud Phone log in details to get started.

Connect users can just log in as normal to see the new features.

If you forget your password, just follow the on-screen steps. And if you need any extra support, check out the Cloud Phone help page.

For Avaya IP Office customers

Free unlimited access to online training content

We’re giving you free use of the Avaya IP Office training portal online.

Sign up today to get 24/7 access to a wide range of training – including administration courses, video tutorials, live web cast broadcasts, and even one-to-one ‘guru’ sessions.

You can also use the training to manage your Avaya IP Office system. So it’ll be quick and simple for you to switch on call forwarding, record announcements, and update business hours. It’s one more way we can help your business manage the impact of coronavirus.

Complete an order form online to sign up to our training offer

View terms and conditions of training offer

For other IP solutions such as BT Cloud Voice Express, BT One Phone and BT Cloud Voice SIP

We're currently working with our teams and partners to discuss training, collaboration tools and other upgrades that we may be able to offer on these products to help support with remote working. Please continue to check this page regularly for any updates.

Frequently asked questions

Where can I find more general information about BT’s response to the coronavirus?

BT Group has more up to date information on how the coronavirus is impacting the way it works and the steps that it’s taking at https://btplc.com/coronavirus/index.htm

COVID-19 – Openreach closures and how it affects us

Openreach, who provide network access services, have announced that no work will be carried out by engineers inside customer premises, unless they’re part of the Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) of the U.K.

This decision will impact the services we can provide, and certain products may not be available. This is an industry wide issue, not just affecting BT.

We understand this could cause problems for you, but we do have plenty of products that won’t require an Openreach engineer. For example, self-install connectivity solutions and mobile access such as 4G Assure.

Our number one priority is to ensure that businesses and essential public services stay connected whilst protecting the health and wellbeing of our colleagues. We fully support Openreach’s decision, as this change will help protect us all.

We thank you for your patience and understanding.

Read the full update and find out more on the Openreach website

How is BT helping the Public Sector deal with the challenges of COVID-19?

COVID-19 focused service offers

In light of the present challenging circumstances, we’ve put together a list of BT service offers across a number of procurement routes, which will help you to be able to deal with the challenges of COVID-19.