John Linton ....if not forever then for at least a while. We have had a wonderful two weeks.
We had a late and leisurely breakfast and had little time after that to do anything but pack and wait 20 minutes for our transport to Heathrow for our first flight on a 380 ( Emirates) for the long trek to Colombo via Dubai. I have to say that whatever my expectations of the luxury provided by the 380 may have been they were far exceeded by the actuality. The seven hour flight flashed by helped by watching two movies on a large screen and a delightful meal. So we are at Dubai airport waiting 2 hours to get our connecting flight to Colombo in one of (not the) Emirates lounges which appears to be as big as the pitch of the SCG but with fountains, lakes and huge, and comfortable chairs and settees as well as several well stocked bars and two complimentary restaurants) - not appealing at 1 am in the morning and for people who only ate a few hours ago.
We are getting back to 'work mode' with Annette preparing to do the half year reviews for all Sri Lankan staff (nearly 50 of them now) and me thinking about the end of year financial and operational review and the plans for the coming financial year and the major improvements we need to plan for for each of the coming quarters. Personally, I am very happy with what Exetel has accomplished in Colombo since our first tentative 'entry' in February 2007 when we ran an ad and 'interviewed' prospective help desk engineers by telephone and hiring two on a work from your home basis. Since we made the the decision to open a full support/provisioning/sales office some two and a half years ago and especially since we actually moved in to our own rented premises in June of 2008 we have managed to make great strides in providing a level of support excellence that we believed would be possible......to exceed the response times and speed of resolution of problems provided by any other Australian communications company.
It has taken us the best part of two years to achieve the first of three objectives - to answer support, provisioning and sales telephone calls in an average of less than 60 seconds - consistently - month on month. I don't know of any other Australian communications company that goes anywhere near that achievement.
Over the next few days we will finalise the plans to allow us to achieve our second objective - rectifying any customer problem in the shortest possible times - acknowledging the variable time frames imposed by the different carriers we use and the different fault categories involved. In fact the problems we have faced have been how to define and categorise the various scenarios that 'faults' fall into including the issues where there are no faults for us to address - simply set up and usage problems by the customer. However we have several sensible ideas on how we can address these issues and automate the measurement of the actual responses so we can track whether we will be achieving whatever targets we set.
The third target is to have the most knowledgeable support, provisioning and sales personnel in the areas of residential ADSL, Fibre, Wireless Broadband and Mobile services of any communications company in Australia providing those services. We started this process when these functions were based in Australia but we have gone far beyond the simple processes we had in place then. We have a very long way to go but we are continuing to look for ways of improving a problem/question/training knowledge base that combines the best aspects of a wiki based infobase and have endowed a professorship at SLIT to develop the absolute state of the art artificial intelligence interface to that knowledge base. We will further 'refine' our plans for the achievement of this third target before we leave to return to Australia.
So - it's going to be a busy few days so hopefully we will be able to sleep on the next leg of the trip.
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