John Linton
.....ISP Land in Australia....at least it dominates the ISP's chatter about themselves.
Apart from the nonsense that is the TIO (which if you believed any word it published you would be lead to believe that 'service and services' provided by telecommunications companies is continually getting worse) most companies keep hyping all the efforts they are making to improve all aspects of the services and service they provide to their customers. Whether they are being forced to do this in a set of marketplaces in which there is almost no differentiation other than price or the user experience in solving problems is not for me to say...my view is there is no more ability to cut prices (other than cosmetically) so only service (as opposed to services) remains to promote a telecommunications offering.
I downloaded this earlier this morning from an ad in the WSJ:
http://c190499.r99.cf1.rackcdn.com/Aberdeen_Service_Revenue.pdf
it's hardly Earth shattering or ground breaking in any way but it does provide a, somewhat simplistic, view of service as a product that needs to be combined with other products in the overall offering to increase customer retention (it can't play much of a part in customer acquisition). This is hardly 'news' but the fact that is being treated like that indicates something about today's service providers. Anecdotaly Telstra provides some of the worst service in Australia but continues to dominate every service sector in which it operates - so don't get too carried away with this concept......also take this with a grain or sack of salt or so:
http://www.smh.com.au/small-business/managing/blogs/the-venture/and-the-winners-for-poor-customer-service-are--20111212-1oq94.html
One of the issues that Exetel have been addressing for over four years now has been how to improve our, customer perceived, levels of service. It has been an impossibly difficult aspect of business to address given that any unreasonable customer defines service as meeting whatever unreasonable needs they may have at any given time and what even reasonable customers require on occasions. We recently changed our definition of support away from what it had been for our entire 'existence' - we only supported the actual service we provided (if we could successfully 'ping' the customer's modem then we had fulfilled our service obligations) to helping the customer fix their own set up problems and wait on the line to help them correct their configuration and/or set up mistakes. This goes far beyond what any service organisation is required to provide (fixing the customer's inadequaces or that of equipment the bought from another supplier)nand should not be required - but then meeting unreasonable customer's needs is how unreasonable customers define "service".
The immediate result of making this change, unsurprisingly, is greater dissatisfaction with the service we provide with average call response times 'blowing out' from around 2 minutes to around 8 minutes. So the move to 'complete service' is currently a failure in those terms. How we address that issue is yet to be seen but we have achieved the main objective of the move whereby over 80% of all support calls (that do not require carrier intervention) are now 'fixed' on the first call and it seems likely that we can 'ratchet up' that percentage over the coming months....depending on being able to do a number of things which include some quite difficult ones like changing the ambitions of our support engineers and providing ongoing training in the ever growing array of hardware used by residential ADSL users these days.
We need to be successful in these endeavours, not purely to improve what unreasonable residential customers perceive as 'adequate' service levels but to address the new type of user we expect to be dealing with in 2012. We already have a sizable percentage of our ADSL customers who use their service for business and we expect this to grow more rapidly over the coming three years. While a residential user who can't play his latest game because he has been fiddling with his router settings is a personal tragedy for him but a small business customer who can't use the internet because he/his wife/his children/his co worker(s) etc have "done something" to his set up is a lot more serious. Providing service to the small business sector of the market place is a real challenge to do well. If it also improves the residential user experience then that will be a bonus.
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