John Linton
......seems to depend on who you are in most cases in this industry.
When we set up our support, provisioning, accounts query and sales operation in Sri Lanka we set some very, very tough 'standards' to be achieved over time. We planned to move all four of those services over a six month period (from July 2008 through December 2008) and pretty much completed that process on schedule.....hiring 25 people in Colombo to accomplish the transition of these services. We then hired a 'local' General Manager who came from a suitable background and continued to hire additional personnel and, today, we have 50 people in the Colombo office.
In April we achieved our first major residential "support" objective for the first time - answering all support, provisioning and sales calls within 60 seconds of the first ring:
http://forum.exetel.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=324&t=27043&start=30
That is quite a remarkable achievement. If you look at the call answer statistics published by iinet/Westnet or Internode (or if you can be bothered doing your own research by calling any other ISP's support numbers) you will almost certainly wait longer than twenty minutes for a response and often more than double or treble that time. So Exetel has achieved something, in terms of "support", that no other ISP in Australia comes close to delivering - the fastest telephone call response times of any data communications provider in Australia. Nice to see and it will be even nicer to see that it is sustained over the coming months.
The second major objective we set, for telephone calls, when we moved "support" to Sri Lanka was to deal with any telephoned problem within the first call (if it was not a problem involving a carrier) and within 48 hours if it did involve a carrier. This requires each person who answers a call to possess a great deal of experience and have ready access to 'complete' trouble shooting documentation and 'tools' and also ready access to very highly knowledgeable and experienced Level 3 support personnel. After almost two years of operation we have not yet reached that stage of development but it's the next major goal. I believe it will be possible to reach that next major objective before the end of this calendar year because we have one, very significant, advantage over any other "support centre" that I have known - we have an extraordinarily low 'staff turnover' rate and therefore we retain the people we employ for far longer than the better 'support centres' operated by the people we compete with.
Our very high personnel retention rate is the result of our very different personnel hiring policies - pay three times as much as the 'market average' which gives you the ability to select only the very, very best people (against very 'elite' criteria) and they have no 'temptations' to be lured away by other 'support centres' paying them more money once they are fully trained. We also provide by far the best working conditions and management practices that tend to eliminate the other major factors in personnel turn over....lack of promotion, bonuses recognising performance, training, top management reviews on a regular basis, no "hot desking" and all of the other processes that are aimed at making working for Exetel a better experience than anything they would have experienced before joining us. I am of the opinion that this single factor is the key to achieving the remainder of our "support" objectives over the coming year....that and exceptionally good management.....without which nothing of any difficulty can ever be achieved.
So far so good - we have put in place a facility that, over time, will be regarded as providing levels of service unheard of in Australian data communications if it continues to make its current rate of progress and continues to adhere to the standards that make such a result possible. Doing it, consistently, is a completely different kettle of finny things.
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