John Linton
The 1st of December is always a very uplifting day (especially one as bright, warm and sunny as it is today in Sydney) with what has always been one of the most enjoyable business periods of the year - the traffic begins to noticeably thin making driving to the office a little quicker and progressively easier, and the people you meet casually in sandwich shops and coffee bars seem more cheerful with that general relaxing extending to most business contacts and, of course, the Christmas party 'round'. It's two weeks to the Exetel Christmas drinks and gambling night and that is always an enjoyable time and then a week later it's Christmas Eve - always nice to have this, effectively, three week month - at least for most people.
Our December bill run was completed early and it was better than expected being a little more than the preliminary figures showed yesterday (as it always is) and it's always nice to get the brief 'warm glow' that looking at those figures in detail gives you. The most striking result was a 50% increase in SMS via IP billing which was pleasing to see how that 'minor add on' service is being so well used by a rapidly increasing number of Exetel customers. 6 of the 9 other services increased over the previous month as the expected/planned declines in Unwired, stand alone Wire line rental and stand alone Wire line call charges continue to diminish as those services are allowed to 'wind down'.
The other notable aspect of the figures was the strong growth in VOIP revenue - almost 20% up on the previous month with both the number of users and the amount of use per customer increasing. Revenue from VoIP has quadrupled since January 2008 (admittedly from a very low base) and I think Exetel's customers take up of the service is reflected generally across all providers of VoIP in Australia. In terms of quality we scarcely ever see a complaint and I never have a problem in using it from my office wire line phone or from my mobile so there appears to be no reason for anyone to pay the high costs of PSTN calls in these difficult financial times.
It was interesting to see the result of adding an Account Service Charge in terms of any 'negative' it might have had on our ADSL broad band customers churning away from Exetel because of it. If there was an effect it was so minor it didn't reflect itself in the figures with less people moving away from Exetel in November 2008 than did in November 2007 and the number of ADSL broadband customers has increased over 35% since then. In fact the number of customers churning from Exetel in November was less than in the previous month. Perhaps we did manage to explain the circumstances well enough for the vast majority of customers to understand what we were trying to accomplish on their behalf.
I will be interested to see what the various carriers and larger communications providers come up with in terms of "Christmas Promotions" as, unless I'm going blind, I haven't seen any of the expected deep discounts yet which seems strange as there is usually quite a few starting in the last 10 days on November. Maybe I'm missing them as they have been 'buried' in other price and product changes? By now there would normally be an assault by Telstra and Optus and their larger resellers on "amazing" mobile deals and there would also be other "amazing" broadband deals (and now HSPA I would have thought) from the likes of Dodo and AAPT and iPrimus - and then there's the ubiquitous iinet "specials'.
I can't think of any I've seen......
Exetel has never done anything like that but as I see, perhaps in my blindness, so little from all of the other usual suspects I was thinking yesterday that it might be something we should do. having existed for almost 5 years on a basis of no advertising, marketing or any other type of promotion we would be strictly limited in what we could put in place. We will give money to our country agents to advertise the HSPA service in their local areas to both help them in what may be becoming difficult times and we have made enough reductions in our overall operating expenses to allow some money to be allocated to "marketing' - but that's as far as the 'thinking' has got.
I compiled a list of possibilities while half watching the football earlier this morning (essential result/some good 'fortune'/high standard game) and will actually do something about it later today if any of the 'ideas' seem able to stand the light of day but nothing I noted down inspired me. Probably the only thing that came out of that list was to reduce the activation charges on the main copper broadband services to zero for a 12 month contract but I've always been very much against long contract times so that is unpalatable to me personally. Just reducing the activation charges isn't particularly 'promotional' so I'll have to come up with something before it's too late to have any impact for the month.
The other aspect of this Christmas period I have noticed that appears to be different to previous years is the number of 'Christmas Function' invitations I have received this year. Despite my long held anti-social practice of never attending any supplier or buyer function I usually get an invitation to some sort of Christmas 'event' from all of Exetel's major suppliers (except Telstra Wholesale). This has been the case this year but, for whatever reason and I can't think of one, I have received almost triple the number of such invitations this year with the 'extras' coming from our two banks, our insurers, two major accounting firms we don't do business with, our landlord, three of our major customers and a large number of our smaller suppliers. Very odd.
I think, in the Spirit Of Christmas Present (Temporal/Dickensian use of that word but resulting in the magnaminous meaning at a later date) we will get some better buying prices for at least some of the base services we buy which will be able to be reflected in several end user services if not in December than at least from February onwards. We have had enough 'information exchanges' with at least two new suppliers to allow us to think we will be able to do some more interesting things early in the new year even if our current suppliers aren't able to do what we have asked of them.
So with Christmas very much in the air it's time to be happy and promote as much good will as possible. I wish I could find a way of doing that.