John Linton
......less of an impossible dream but still more than just a few windmills on the horizon.
We have spent a considerable amount of time reviewing our support processes over the past three months against the targets set and are generally happy with the improvements. Answer times for 'support' have continued to fall and we are 'in sight' of the current objective of answering any support call within an average of two minutes during the extended support telephone answering times which will be a very significant achievement. Similarly sales answer average answer times have reduced and are getting closer to the two minute average which is the current target. Provisioning support remains at an average close to 20 seconds. Steve will go to Colombo this weekend to continue the 'quality' review of the support and sales processes which are harder to measure but which are more important than the logistical processes.
We have continued to slowly build the number of personnel we have in Sri Lanka and are now approaching 50 people - if you care to you can see the 'faces' and qualifications of the people employed by going here:
http://www.exetel.com.au/staff-sl.php
One thing you might notice is the very high level of qualifications practically all the support personnel have which follows the previous Exetel Australian standard of only having IT degree/diploma qualified personnel providing technical support to Exetel customers - something that is, as far as I know, highly unusual (possibly unique) in support operations around the world. The Australian personnel and their qualifications can be seen here:
http://www.exetel.com.au/staff.php
The main reason that we made the decision to move support to Sri Lanka was the impossibility of retaining degree qualified people to work in support positions in Australia for long enough periods for them to become truly useful as they all wanted to 'progress their careers' faster than we could provide those opportunities and they regarded 'support' as an 'entry level' position rather than the career it can be for people who wish to do that.
We could solve this problem in Sri Lanka by paying our support personnel so well that they are happier to spend longer in support and therefore becoming more knowledgeable which meant that we could solve the problem of continuing knowledge loss as competent support personnel move to other positions either with Exetel or with another company. We also could pay 2 - 3 times more than other multi-national companies because we didn't want the problem of training people and then have them leave for more money elsewhere. This approach could not be done in Australia because we couldn't afford to pay help desk engineers $A90,000 a year in their first year as a support person....but you should be able to guess at what 'quality' of graduate you could get if you did that.
So providing support from Sri Lanka gives Exetel the opportunity of hiring a much higher qualified level of support engineer and, in theory, retaining their services for longer and therefore being able to have a much higher standard of person at the end of a telephone line or replying to an email in Sri Lanka than could ever be possible in Australia. The key issue is one of training and rapidly increasing each individual's in depth knowledge of not only the systems within Exetel but the vagaries of the different broad band and other services in Australia - particularly the differences between the various carriers that Exetel uses. We are slowly developing better ways of doing this than we ever had in Australia but it is a never ending task and we have a very long way to go....almost certainly for ever.
We are gradually extending the support hours provided to Australian end users and before the end of this financial year expect to provide telephone and email support 24 x 7 x 12 with 2 minute or less average answer times. The ongoing issue will be the retention of highly trained people and the constant improvement in transferring knowledge to new employees which we are now working on in several innovative ways. Provision of support and other services from Sri Lanka has come a long way since we first made a decision to try and make this happen four years ago and the speed of development has increased much more rapidly since we opened our offices there some 18 months ago.Interestingly our first two Sri Lankan personnel will reach the fourth anniversary of their employment with us in a few weeks time.
Our major issue now is to work out discretely measurable ways of measuring the quality of the service we provide to Australian customers on an ongoing basis. While perfection may not ever be possible to achieve it is going to be very interesting to see how close we can get to it.