I have been lucky enough to have enjoyed almost perfect health in terms of never, with perhaps two exceptions, having had cause to visit a doctor in the whole of my life other than to get some sort of mandatory inoculations or vaccinations. However I did have a bout of nausea yesterday evening of a violent and unpleasant kind that I put down to reading an email that pointed something out to me that I found too incredible for, apparently, my mind/body to react to in any other way....or maybe it was the fourth piece of pizza which was particularly greasy?
The statement, and I am quoting exactly, was:
"Exetel charges so little for ADSL and makes no money out of providing the service that it doesn't care whether its good customers either stay or go because there is no financial benefit to Exetel in either case so I'm going to move to an ISP like Internode or Adam where they really value their customers because they make a lot of money out of them".
There was no elaboration as to what might have changed in his particular circumstances to generate this statement and when I checked his service history he had never raised a ticket with Exetel over the time we had been providing any service to him and looking at his usage records there were no aberrations in downloads over the previous 12 months which might indicate some sort of issue. I have a great deal of trouble in actually understanding why a customer who apparently has had a trouble free service for his time of usage would then suggest that the lack of profit Exetel makes in providing ADSL services means that he should go to another provider who charges much more.(Exetel chooses to make less than $A1.00 per month 'profit' from providing its ADSL services but that is our choice and has nothing to do with the quality of the service)
If there were more hours in the day I would have replied to his email seeking clarification but there aren't so I simply replied thanking him for his use of our services and wishing him more success with his next provider. I had never considered, up to that moment, that trying to reduce the end user price of providing any service to the lowest possible level was anything but something that was entirely in the very best interests of any customer. It seems impossible to me that people who operate a business on such a basis can be considered to "not care" about the best interests of the customer - surely, de facto, not charging more than covering costs with a minute amount for profit is acting in a deeply caring way about customers? Apparently charging the lowest amount possible can now be seen as an act of uncaring about customers?
(As an aside - I wonder what this about to be ex-customer thinks about Exetel providing services to its Pioneer Customers at a loss for as long as they stay customers? Is that, by his definition, an act of even greater uncaring?).
So, having slept on it, I came to the conclusion that he must mean that by charging so little Exetel have to skimp on providing some elements of the service that are essential to the correct functioning of the service....I could be quite wrong but that is as close to making sense of someone complaining about a price being too low that I can reach at the moment. Except that I can't, after being closely associated with the operation of ISPs for the past 15 or so years, see ANY element, that Exetel doesn't provide, and provide at least as well as any ISP in Australia - and provides many that are better. Having said that, which is obviously based on my personal understanding of what is required to deliver a complete ADSL service, I still can't, in any way, understand how trying to reduce the cost of a service to the lowest possible level can then be judged to be "uncaring". Is it a requirement of satisfactory service to make a large profit? Does that mean if your company has no interest in making a substantial profit that you shouldn't be in business?
As I have never, in the whole of my commercial life, seen such a view expressed before I think I must have misunderstood what was really meant. Perhaps all that was meant was that by charging so little it wasn't possible to include some element that was really required and that element was far more important than a lower cost of the overall service. Perhaps we need to poll our current customers to get their suggestions as to what Exetel need to do to add to the current service elements and what should be charged to provide them?
Personally I blame decades of poor English language education for producing an increasing number of Australians who can't clearly express themselves in written communications. (My own inability to communicate clearly in written form is entirely due to my own laziness).
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