John Linton
....come from a refreshed mind and strange places/times to think about old issues.
One, of the huge number, of benefits of taking a break once a year is that as the tiredness begins to fall away you remember what it's like to have a mind that can reason clearly again. A benefit of being in a totally different physical and cultural environment is that it helps you regain perspectives you gradually lose throughout yet another brutally punishing mental and physical year. We've been away for 10 days now (11 if you count the flight from Sydney to Heathrow) and instead of the drab North Sydney business area and the even drabber traffic chaos of Military Road we have been immersed in the depths of some of England's most beautiful and spectacular deeply rural landscapes and our only physical contacts have been with people who aren't remotely interested in either Australia or the Australian communications industry. So the contrast between our day time explorations of the Devon and Cornwall moors and woodlands and my brief catch up with my email and then writing this blog becomes ever sharper as each successive day goes by - something I'm sure that every other person who has a demanding 'day job' has experienced for themselves.
Today, because we had idled around too long in the far West country, we needed to do some freeway driving to get closer to London and it was a very unpleasant experience - not because of the freeways themselves but because within 15 minutes of leaving our hotel we found ourselves at a standstill for the best part of an hour (caused by a fatal accident that forced the police to close the A30 near Exeter) which forced us on to a long and very slow B road detour dawdling along behind the heavy traffic in the same boat as ourselves. It had an upside in that we chanced across a beautiful pub on the River Dart with a terrace looking on to a 15th Century Bridge and rapids where we sopped for a fresh trout lunch that we shared with the local ducks who, like Sydney's pigeons and sea gulls, came and snatched food from your hand and wandered around and under the outside tables as if they owned the place. Nice interlude - we found our way on to the M5 only to find 30 or so miles later another tailback due to closing 4 of 8 lanes for maintenance. So a 150 mile motor way/A Road trip ended up taking over five hours instead of a bit over two.
So the humdrum and 'standard' re-intruded in to our lives in no uncertain manner. But being relaxed and revived it didn't produce any effect on me other than one or two muttered comments at the peak of the delays. We eventually reached our selected resting place for the night and a couple of gulped down glasses of something appropriate immediately dis-spelled any remaining ill feeling and allowed me to quickly write down the ideas I had considered while waiting in stalled traffic for so long which revolved around one blindingly obvious situation that perhaps you have to travel halfway round the globe to see clearly. This incredible insight was that there is nothing more Exetel can do to improve the current wire line plans it offers to its current customers other than to slightly reduce the prices over time as/if we get better cost prices from our suppliers.
What we need is to retain our current customer 'types' by maintaining the current plans and offer new plans that would not appeal to current customers but would appeal to different customer types. For over 5 years we have maintained a process of having one main plan type and we have kept improving it to appeal to a wider and wider 'audience'/types of users rather than offer different plans for different types of users. We vaguely realised this some months ago and offered a "no frills" type of plan - but in essence that concept wasn't correct and could never have achieved what we need to do to 'attract' two, maybe three, different types of users. So a few traffic problems (that before I went on holidays would have given me a heart attack) turned out to be a trigger to look at a very old problem in a very different way.
I am hoping the inspiration lasts long enough for me to actually translate the concept into concrete plans.