John Linton ....as tomorrow we have to catch our 1.30 am Friday morning flight to Singapore.
Annette has almost finished the personnel reviews and I have only got an hour or so of wrapping up the general directions of the SL company over the coming months to do tomorrow. I still think that the Sri Lankan operation can be the 'perfect company' that exceeds 'world's best practices' in every aspect of its operations. It would be really good to participate in the creation of such an entity rather than doing anything else in commercial life.
We spent some time today trying to determine just how we could measure the SL company's performance against meaningful, impartial, 'yard sticks' that would show each person within the SL operation just how good the company they worked for actually is in terms of its minute by minute performance. We came up with a number of good ideas of how this could be done and between now and the end of calendar 2010 we believe we can put those impartial measurements in place. It always surprises me, and always has, that I can actually be part of something that is so much better than anything else I can observe in my journey through commercial life. Perhaps that''s because I have always assumed that everyone else was so much better in every respect than I have ever been or the companies I have worked for/participate in have ever been.
At the end of this, 10th or so, formal review of the SL operation I actually am becoming more convinced that there is no higher standard of commercial and societal achievement any where else across the globe. That is obviously something that is very hard to believe and I may be completely wrong - I often am. However the more stringently we apply performance measures to Exetel in this country the more obvious it it that the operation in Colombo is something very special. Between now and when we leave tomorrow we will determine just how we can put in place the metrics that demonstrate just how significant the performance of this small commercial entity is by "world standards".
We were thinking of using a metric that divides the total number of fault tickets in any month by the number of TIO complaints and the number of formal replies to closed tickets of customer dissatisfaction and also the number of 'praise' responses on closed tickets. This would give a relatively clear view of how well the SL operation handles the 6,000 or so 'complaints' our 125,000 or so customers register each month. The current measurements show that less than one half of one percent of customers who have some problem with some aspect of their Exetel service are unhappy with how their problem was dealt with.....pretty impressive.
There are all sorts of other measurement we already have in place for the overll peration of the services we deliver but almost all of them do not relate to the specific activities of the SL company (mrtg, dns and other bitty bytey things). Measuring service performance beyond the obvious simplistic metrics is much more difficult.
Exetel Sri Lanka is a very special commercial enterprise.
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