John Linton
...why is it that so few actually deliver it?
We completed the second day of the Sri Lankan company review
yesterday which remains on schedule with only some relatively minor aspects to
be cleared up tomorrow. Annette also completed almost all of the personnel
reviews by COB and we will do the full personnel review after completing the
business plan review tomorrow morning. The Sri Lankan company has grown rapidly
over the last few months and
will
continue to grow as rapidly over the coming three months if we continue to
develop the facilities as we have discussed over the past two days.
Our objectives are to create as perfect a customer support
and service operation as it is possible to deliver for Australian users of
residential data communication services. Such aspirations, when they are put
into a few words, always sound pretentious in various ways and are often
meaninglessly empty and can be found as company objectives on web sites and ‘promotional’
literature scattered over the width and breadth of Australia. In simplistic terms
it is stated to be the essential element of commercial success and, I suppose,
in some ways that can be true in certain circumstances because really it isn’t
exactly difficult to achieve….. all that is needed is money and time plus the
commitment of the directors of the company to have it achieved.
I’ve heard it said ,
many times, that any company can do it – if they want to.
As can be seen from the article by Paul Sheehan cited
yesterday and the comments attached to it,
company’s as large and wealthy as Telstra don’t come within a mythical “bull’s
roar” of achieving it. Telstra are not alone in that failure it is a lack of
achievement replicated by practically every other data communications provider
in Australia in some degree or other. For companies like Telstra, or Optus or
AAPT or (fill in any name you care to) it isn’t a matter of money, they all
have the money and often spend more than is required. It isn’t even a lack of desire to make it
happen – that can be concluded from the amount of money the various larger companies
actually spend on their customer support operations. It’s often the inadequacy
of the management entrusted with the objective of achieving it, probably more
often that the lack of money or the lack of directorial will.
Exetel does have the directorial will to aim to provide perfect
service. We certainly don’t have anything like the money available to any of
our larger ‘competitors’ and we very definitely won’t have the profit margins available
to any of our competitors, and by virtue of our base tenet that we must always
offer the lowest priced services at all times we never will have, so throwing
money at “service” is never going to be available to us. We may or may not have
the managerial dedication and skill but that can’t possibly be known at this
time.
So why aim at such a very, very difficult objective? The
obvious reason is that ‘support service’ is at least one element of any truly successful service type in any market of any service offering and without it
then you need major advantages in other areas which, for a company of Exetel’s
size, are difficult to achieve because the buying power of our much larger ‘competitors’
will never be available to a company of our siz. So the two things that are available to a smaller company competing with larger companies is the quality of people they acquire and the skill with which they manage them and the results superior people managed and directed in a superior way can bring to bear on their services. In other words the simple way of approaching the issue is to have better people - and it is that simple.
Exetel have the opportunity, by hiring truly excellent people in Sri Lanka (which we have the opportunity of doing because we choose to pay three times more than other companies and provide working conditions that are, at least, three times better than other employers) to deploy customer support personnel that are in every way 'superior' in terms of the ability to deliver the very best standards of customer service. The only thing that we can't be sure we have is the management dedication and long term commitment to making a perfect customer support operation a reality. So that is our challenge in Sri Lanka and what we will concentrate on later today.
It will be the first step to delivering perfect customer service - unless we fail like so many other commercial operations before us.
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