Saturday, February 6. 2010Share Drops Keep Showing In The Red.....John Linton ......and just like the guy whose financial needs are to big for his... (apologies to B J Thomas). My personal share holdings mirrored the average by losing 10% of their value over the past few weeks and show no sign of reversing a continuing decline. While it's re-assuring that Krudd and Whine have declared the 'GFC' to be over (because they have spent all the money that artificially propped up one or two financial indicators for a few months) every sign I see around me is that financial conditions are steadily getting tighter and tighter - both around the rest of the world and in Australia. That is not particularly bad news for a highly efficient company like Exetel but it does have some very real negatives. Declined payments from the monthly bill run increased by over 10% and perhaps some of that is due to the usual 'time of year issues' (overspending over the Christmas holiday period) it doesn't account for all of it. Suppliers, irrespective that Exetel pays every bill very promptly and all small supplier's bills as soon as they have been checked continue to demonstrate increasing anxiety about their outstanding receivables and Exetel continues to get lower offers for services we buy if we buy greater volumes. I conducted a mini-survey of new customers who churned their connection to Exetel over a one week period and got some surprising replies. The 'survey' was ultra basic and was via email: Thank You For Choosing Exetel Dear [ ], Thank you very much for choosing Exetel to provide your internet services, we very much appreciate your business and will do everything we possibly can to make sure you continue to believe your decision to move from your previous supplier was the best decision you could have made. Should you care to do so we would appreciate it if you could 'reply' to this email and filling in the brief questionnaire below before hitting the 'submit' function in your email client. 1) Why did you decide choose Exetel? a) Recommendation by a friend? b) Your own research ? c) Previous Exetel customer? d) Other - please specify? 2) What Prompted Your Decision To Move ISPs? a) Need for more downloads at better price? b) Need for same downloads at lower price? c) Unhappy with previous ISP? d) Other - please specify [Of the 312 emails sent we received 287 replies. Of the replies the percentage break down by reason was: Question 1) a) - 47%; b) - 29%; c) - 15%; d) - 9%] Question 2) a) - 17%; b) - 64%; c) - 5%; d) - 14%] A surprising result. I haven't had time to think through whether this very small poll actually means anything or not but the 64% moving to a new provider to reduce costs rather than to get more downloads would not have been what I would have picked before seeing the 'results'. If it is at all reflective of something more general then it seems to indicate that there are more people in Australia than just me who think times are tougher than some people would have the more gullible of us believe. Of course it is a less than minute number of responses and in that clear sense has absolutely no relevance but it has encouraged me to look at implementing some sort of ongoing questionnaire for new customers that can be automatically parsed in to an ongoing report of reasons why new customers come to Exetel. It might be very helpful. I guess we could also, if we can develop such a process for new customers, put in place the same process for customers who cancel their service with Exetel. The current feed back mechanisms (fora, suggestion box) do a great job in making suggestions on how Exetel's services and processes can be improved (over 600 suggestions were implemented in 2009) but I imagine a formal analysis of why customers leave could also be very useful. I will check on what's involved but it shouldn't take too much effort or time to put something useful in place....and as we will write the code ourselves we can make alterations/additions as we find out what can be improved. One more thing to add to the never ending list of things that should be done.
Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry
No Trackbacks
Comments
Display comments as
(Linear | Threaded)
Our time is still coming. Everyone except a politician has been saying it for a while now. China is tightening their spending/lending/borrowing and it will flow onto us. We survived off their stimulus. It's unfortunate that Rudd has spent the bank and more because when our time comes it'll be great! USD likely to collapse this year. I suggest you wait for a quick dip in silver or gold and buy some. It'd be a nice experiment.
Lets face it if people had to write a cheque to the tax department like businesses instead of having it taken out weekly we would not have such huge public service and 'progressive' government which is going to be the death of this country. Then again my outlook on the world is quite narrow only being 20, so what would I know. Comments (2)
John
I am not surprised at your survey result. I see the same every week in the supermarket. Almost all of the sold-out items are generics - lowest price. As for the stockmarket, I have been all in cash since 1996. The market is still over-valued and I expect earnings to drop. Eventually this must take the market down perhaps another 50% - or more if it is a depression Keep up the good work of positioning Exetel for the bad times Cheers R Comment (1)
I am only surprised that as many as 92% of people responded to your email at all!
The fact that the majority of people were refered by a friend (I assume that this friend is a current Exetel customer) and that they chose Exetel to get a cheaper service does not surprise in one bit. It is the selling point that I used with the couple of people I have refered lately, and it was I joined. Comment (1)
While it's re-assuring that Krudd and Whine have declared the 'GFC' to be over
I'm not sure that's correct. From what I've seen, they've both been saying that despite Australia's good recent economical results, Australians should NOT be complacent, because it's NOT over, and worse is yet to come. In fact, I heard Rudd make this very statement on last night's TV news. Comment (1)
Yep ever since the days of the 'Asian student'telling his friends about where he(/she) finds cheap data, the word has spread round. And now four fifths of people want the same thing.
Congratulations, well done. I also think 2010 may be a year for IPTV. Comment (1)
looking for a cheaper price is an obvious thing but the results certainly highlight how important referrals are
Comment (1)
I'm glad you are considering running exit surveys.
I left Exetel only because you could not offer ADSL2 at the exchange I moved to. I was quite surprised when I canceled the existing service that no one asked why I was leaving. I would have felt better telling someone that I wanted to stay with Exetel, and even better if Exetel would automatically contact me when ADSL2 is provisioned at my exchange. I think you will learn a lot from your customers using an exit survey, and maybe even get a few back (those you want anyway). Peter. Comment (1)
I'm not the least bit surprised by the percentage of customers who moved to Exetel to lower their costs.
If you have the ability to correlate your survey answers with the ISP your customer churned from, I'm tipping that you'll find an enormous number of ex-Bigpond customers in that group. I'm one of the few local IT bunnies in my small town, and I hear the same story over and over and over again: "I signed up with Bigpond because they sent me this brochure offering half price for the first six months, and no connection fee, and I thought: why am I still on dialup when I can get broadband for $15/month? And then (the kids started getting into downloading music|I downloaded a movie|I left Radio National streaming all day) and all of a sudden I have this $700 bill for one month - WTF???? And they told me it would cost another $600 to get out of this and go back to dialup. So they told me their unlimited plan doesn't charge for excess data, so I switched to that, and now I'm paying them $70/month. Bastards! Bastards!" The slowest ADSL service that will play YouTube clips without freezes is 1.5 Mbit/s. Exetel's cheapest 1.5 Mbit plan (NF/1500) costs $40/month and includes 6+12GB downloads, excess downloads at 50c/GB. Telstra's cheapest offering is also $40, and includes 2GB total data transfer (uploads counted!) and excess data at $150/GB (!!) but hey, they've been capping that at $300 since September. And I look at the usage meters I've helped these people install on their browsers, and they're sitting at maybe 200MB for the whole month, because they put a rocket up the kids after the music downloading episode and that's not happening any more; so they're paying Telstra $70 for 200MB of data, and they are pissed off with the whole thing and simply don't want to deal with Telstra again to get their plan changed back, because hey, who wants to risk another big bill? There are lots of people who only want to be able to forward the occasional email joke over Hotmail and check out the link to that YouTube clip without waiting.... five..... minutes. If you offered a 1.5Mbit ADSL1 plan (we country bumpkins don't have ADSL2+ DSLAMs in our exchanges yet) that let them do only that - no personal web space, no Exetel email address, dynamic IP if that's easier for you, not a single frill - for $20/month including 1GB download + $5/GB excess, you would have Telstra refugees arriving in such numbers as to swamp your detention centre as soon as the word got around. Comment (1)
It's a nice thought - only problem is that TELSTRA charge Exetel close to $40.00 a month for the 1500 connection.
Comments (2)
Perhaps exetel wireless if optus is available would be better value.
John how has your Country Wireless venture gone? Comments (2)
Our wirelss sales continue to, very slowly, increase.
Wireless sales around Australia continue to increase very quickly. Right now, at least for us, pricing is a stumbling block. Comments (2)
|
Calendar
QuicksearchArchivesCategoriesBlog AdministrationExternal PHP Application |