John Linton
I spent an interesting first day in this trip to Colombo reviewing various aspects of providing residential support and checking on the progress bench marks we set for this financial year. The 'news' is generally very good with the call wait times for 'support', provisioning and sales all dropping month on month over the past almost eight months and showing every sign of reaching the average one minute wait time by June 30th 2010. That, if it's achieved, will be quite a remarkable effort.Of course that is simply one bench mark out of many that may be achieved. Answering a customer call faster on average than any other Australian communications supplier is only the first step along a very long road.
We spent much of yesterday discussing ways of improving the knowledge of all personnel across the different 'disciplines' and how to both broaden and deepen the knowledge required. We also spent time discussing how to implement the 'assessment' of what progress each person was making in increasing both their personal knowledge and their abilities to deal with the 10 'personality types' they provide service to. That of course is a never ending program but we need to improve, and very quickly improve, our methods of making this happen.
We have also made some substantial progress towards the real key objective of any 'support' organisation which, as far as I am concerned, is to reduce the number of calls made in any twelve month period by 80% of the user base to zero - in other words the service never 'breaks down' or if it does there is no need for the customer to actually speak to 'support' to rectify the problem that is occurring. Now you may well think that is a pipe dream (of a particularly strong batch of opium) but if you look at the various circumstances it could be achievable. Currently the average number of calls per customer per year is sitting around 1.5 using rough arithmetic with over 60% of customers never making a call in any given calendar year. Reducing the number of calls per customer only becomes an exercise in analysing what causes customers to call and to eliminate those reasons - simplistically put but no less valid for being put simplistically.
Over the next two days we will address how we will implement more sophisticated processes of acquiring the key data that our support employees don't have at the moment and how we will use that data to help us reduce call sources and improve resolution times. Obviously the 'hard core' calls all involve our carriers and improving response times across a variety of 'down' situations is not entirely under our control. However we have found that with two out of our three major providers we can get sensible suggestions implemented over time and there is no reason that 'carrier problems' can't be addressed in the same ways that problems totally under our control can be addressed.
We also had the first session of reducing TIO complaints to zero which is a very difficult task, principally because, the TIO simply doesn't obey the regulations and processes set out in its own constitution which causes almost all of the problems with which Exetel is confronted and, I assume, with which any other communications company is confronted - but I obviously have no knowledge of that. We have formally advised the TIO that we will be taking legal action against the TIO as an entity and some individuals within the TIO personally for what we see to be their personal malfeasance, gross negligence and flagrant breach of their constitution under which their actions are set out. We are in the final stages of documenting, in the detail required by our lawyers, 306 gross breaches of the TIO constitution that represents systemic non-functioning of the TIO as an organisation and deliberate corruption to obtain money with menaces by several individual TIO employees.
Our intention is to eliminate all TIO complaints by the end of this financial year by ensuring that the TIO ceases generating false complaints and by ensuring that the false complaints generated by customers are dealt with in a way that eliminates the TIO becoming involved in the ways they have to date. We will produce our, very finely documented statement of claim against the TIO before the end of March and either get agreement that they will 'cease and desist' and remove the obvious 'bad apples' from their employment or we will ask a court to make a determination of the matters documented. What we won't do is put up with the current situation.
It was a productive day.