John Linton ....for those few people who may understand that allegory - let's hope it continues to succeed for us as opposed to failing for Napoleon on that most important of all occasions - though I see no Sir John Colbourne's or 52nd Light Divisions among Exetel's competitors.
It is 'Christmas' 2010 and, unless I'm very much mistaken, there will be one last push for the year by Telstra Retail to meet/exceed whatever calendar year end win back targets they have in place. If this happens there will be a raft of similar/better offers from the larger ISPs as they desperately attempt to address the eocy figures that they will report to the ASX in January - currently a less than impressive set of results for all of them based on the less and less 'public' statements that appear around the place. So I would expect more 'welcome back campaigns' between now and Christmas immediately followed by more SOS pricing from TPG etc resulting in more churn activity than has been seen to date. No Australian communications company, of any size, can realistically 'fight' a billion dollar "marketing" budget. All that can be done is to try and work out how much you can afford to lose in terms of customers while you wait for 'better days' or you find something else to do.
Exetel recently re-introduced an account management fee - this time of $3.00 to separate the cost of running a provisioning, fault resolution, accounting and support service from the cost of providing the network, ports and back hauls to an end customer. We already do this internally so there seemed no real difference to doing it 'externally' as we are now being more seriously approached to provide back end support services for other communication service providers. It also gives us a convenient way of financially measuring the performance of the SL company once it passes its tax free period which will occur mid next calendar year. When I have suggested a monthly fee of less than $4.00 a month to various small companies that have approached us to manage their "support" for them they can't believe its possible to do it for that little and also offer response times of under a minute and full resolution of under 24 hours in the event of there being a 'real' network fault.
Between now and the new year we may, if we decide we want to get into this business, provide such back end services to one or more companies that provide residential communications to Australian users. If we actually do go ahead with such a business we would re-approach the 8 other companies who we had brief talks with over the past 12 months or so to offer them a 'concrete' service that we have now established a track record of consistently supplying:
https://forum.exetel.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=27043&p=237017&hilit=call+statistics#p237017
The attraction to the people who have enquired about us providing such services is that they can't get anywhere close to these response averages and it costs then considerably more than $A4.00 per account per month to achieve something far less. So maybe we will do something like that.
The other reason for 'splitting out' the costs of support (and the 'profit' made from support) was to allow us to provide a new set of plans for most of our current offerings taking advantage of the 'incentives' that the carriers we offering for "net new adds" as they too, even TW, felt the pressures from Telstra Retails ever larger discount offers. Being the nice people that Exetel has always been we have passed ALL of these bonuses/reduced prices on to our customers over the past few weeks to the point where every one of our current customers could take advantage of the fact that they could buy their current service for less or buy much more for the same price. If every customer availed themselves of one of these offers Exetel would end up with 15% less revenue a month from ADSL services (a huge cut) for the 'negative' of re-signing for a new six month contract (ADSL1) or twelve month contract (ADSL2). I don't know how long these 'special offers' will allow us to offer such incredibly generous plans - although I'm told by various permanent whingers that much better offers are available from "every other ISP" (sometimes I wonder why I bother).
If in fact "much better offers" are available, if not from "every other ISP", from some other ISPs that will simply to accelerate Exetel's move to more appreciative markets - though I do understand that the overwhelming majority of current Exetel users don't share the views of the chronic complainers.....many of whom based on the consistency of the IP's and email addresses from which they share their views don't appear to be Exetel customers at all.
I'm finally going to enjoy this beautiful late Spring day and 'get out of the house'.
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