John Linton ......at least it appears that way for Exetel.
We have many excellent automated systems at Exetel which allow the company to pretty much run with only minimal 'management' involvement and virtually no interference with the day to day operations. One of the things I still do, probably out of long habit rather than any real need or even any useful purpose, is to look at the application listings of people signing up for the various services. I have noticed a quite significant change in broad band sign ups lately.
The change is in the 'surnames' of people applying for new or 'churn' Exetel broad band services. Throughout the five years we have been providing ADSL a significant proportion of our customers have been people of Asian origin - at least this appears to have been the case in terms of the names on the application forms. This has meant that for five years now between 30% and 40% (I have no precise analysis) of Exetel's broad band customer base was Asian compared to the ABS statistics that show a general percentage of the Australian population as being less than 10% of Asian origin.
If I was to take the sign ups from January 1st 2009 as indicative of sign ups by area of origin that number has fallen, 'dramatically'', from close to 40% to less than 10% (in line with the ABS statistics but almost 75% less than only a short time ago). While I have no idea what this might mean, if anything, it is so sudden and so noticeable it is worth considering.I have looked at samples of sign ups going back twelve months and there is no indication that this is a 'progressive' thing and in looking at January 2008 the contrast is quite marked.
My first thoughts were that Exetel no longer has the high download plans that were particularly favoured by Asian students of which there are a disproportionately high percentage at NSW's universities and NSW still accounts for close to 70% of our total user base. So I had a look at the actual names of the churn aways to other ISPs over the last 3 months and sure enough almost 80% of customers churning away from Exetel had names of Asian origin and the majority of them churned to TPG.
It's anecdotal and far from precise information but it seems to say that Exetel is no longer appealing to a demographic that it once did (and only very recently) and that TPG is the 'destination' of choice for people looking for high download plans at reasonable prices that Exetel once served. If that's the case then it is interesting in a number of ways.
Firstly our overall daily sign ups (number of applications x monthly ASDL plan value - excluding telephone component) are running well ahead of last year and, if this trend continues we will have a record January by a fair margin. The actual number of sign ups isn't being affected by the 'desertion' of a previously very important 'demographic' which means that another 'demographic' has replaced/more than replaced what looks like the Asian student who used to find Exetel very attractive.
A second noticeable thing is that bandwidth usage in the NSW connections has dropped although the actual number of users has continued to increase. This isn't true in the other States where bandwidth usage has increased in line both with increased numbers of customers and the time of year (January is usually quite heavy with the effect of the long school holidays).
Thirdly the percentage of Sydney based new customers has noticeably dropped as a percentage in favour of other NSW areas. I find this very surprising as I would have expected that with TW opening up ADSL2 exchanges to other ISPs there would be less interest in our ADSL1 services in country areas of NSW (or any other State). In fact our NSW sales continue to grow faster than those in all other States which has continued to surprise me for quite a while now. The only reason I can think of is that we have very strong agents throughout regional NSW and the number of towns in which we have agents continues to increase.
I suppose, though not directly related to the first three, is the fact that 'Naked' ADSL2 applications now exceed the aggregate of both other ADSL2 applications by a factor of 2:1. This ratio continues to increase with more and more ADSL2 customers becoming happier to get rid of their PSTN line and rely on either VoIP or their mobile(s) for telephone calls. However I don't know whether this fits in to the pattern by TPG having more ADSL2 exchanges that offer naked ADSL2 - I thought it was the reverse.
So, I don't know what to make of this information and even if I can actually come to some conclusions I'm not sure I could then use the conclusions to do anything abut it - so maybe I'm just wasting my time looking in to it (and your time reading about my lack of understanding). However, any obvious change has to have an explanation and it's really important for any small business to at least try and find out the reasons that some, and perhaps some quite significant, change has occurred to its 'attraction' to the different market demographics.
I guess the best thing to do is to monitor the changes in 'sign ups' and 'churn aways' more closely in terms of looking at the demographics rather than just the raw numbers.