John Linton .....record results in all parts of Exetel's business.
We arrived in Bangkok late yesterday afternoon and caught up with the news, Exetel and otherwise in Australia, when we checked in to our hotel. Despite all the negative financial news that saturates the world financial press the end of month reports for Exetel showed a uniform set of rcord breaking results and the August 1st billing run (recurrent revenue) also set a new record (after allowing for the addition of the change in billing date for some telephone services).
ADSL2 services showed particularly strong growth in July but then so did ADSL1 with all other services also growing strongly in terms of increased new monthly orders that are subsequently reflected in increased monthly recurrent revenues.While I am, of course, very pleased that the first month of the new planning year has been on or above the planned targets I found it a little disconcerting that it would be so strong when all indications are that it shouldn't have been.
Having been away from Australia for almost the whole of July I can have no first hand 'sensing' of what happened. My first thought is that because of the widespread coverage of various views on the Labor NBN 'tender' more interest was generated in broad band than would have otherwise been the case - even the most non-technical of publications seemed to print articles and comments and I can only suppose that might well have been the case on TV and radio.
Anyway - whatever happened in July is now in the past and it's a new month with new challenges and 'strategies'. I thought about how to address the new/dial up changer/low usage customer needs during the flight from Heathrow to Bangkok and the subsequent long night of jet lag readjustment that followed. I think that it would be possible to offer a 'free' broadband service by bundling it (a la UK style) with a telephone line rental service. Something like:
FREE ADSL2 When You Use Exetel As Your Telephone Service Provider
with the telephone line rental of around $32.95 (or a figure that matches one of Telstra's line rental plans) and call costs at 10% less than Telstra's call charges. From what I can see, from a long way away, the combined line rental and profit from the calls would cover the cost of the ADSL2 monthly port rental plus a charge of, say, $A15.00 per gb would make the plan profitable under most circumstances.
It's only a first 'cut' but it does seem to work financially and it seems to be the preferred method in the UK for 'marketing'. I'm sure with a lot more thought it could be made much more attractive than my simple words used here portray and, unless anything has changed in the past 4,000 or so, years "FREE" is still the most powerful word in sales and marketing.
Such a plan couldn't include the 48 gb of included off peak downloads or any of the other inclusions in the current Exetel ADSL2 plans but then someone switching from dial up doesn't use those things at the moment so they wouldn't miss them. I would think that someone who most likely, at least in their early months, would seldom use more than 500 or so mbytes of downloads would be very happy to get the speed of ADSL2 in their area for around $A10.00 a month in usage charges with no other monthly plan charge. Even at 2 gb they are still paying only $A30.00 a month which is a very low cost ADSL2 plan.
I think it would be possible to offer a zero cost 'activation charge' on such a plan and even a zero cost ADSL2 modem for an 18 month contract and, once again, that is a pretty 'universal' requirement for customers who want zero cost hardware and activations of either broad band or other types of communications services. My thinking in giving away the hardware is that if such a plan was successful then it would significantly accelerate Exetel achieving the next 'volume break' lower pricing on ADSL2 services which would provide the 'funding' for the hardware giveaway. If the plan isn't popular then we wouldn't be giving away very much so it wouldn't matter.
I've never put any effort in to marketing any of Exetel's services - relying purely on price/performance to deliver the 'message'. However time moves on and Exetel's current users, even long term ones, have changing needs which we need to address with a different service 'line up'. - assuming that's possible of course.
So, with a bit of work, and some supplier accommodations, it may be possibleto offer a 'free' ADSL2 service to current dial up customers to address that market in a much better way than we have been able to do to date.