John Linton We finished up the personnel reviews and the review of the SL Company operations earlier today and completed the trip with a dinner with the SL GM and the two Australians currently here transferring knowledge. It was a very pleasant farewell dinner which covered a wide range of issues. It is never pleasant to leave anywhere at 1 am in the the morning but that is an inevitability of coming to and leaving from Sri Lanka at this point in time. It has been a particularly useful and worthwhile trip with a lot of ground covered and a large number of positive decisions made.
I sometimes wonder about my personal lack of abilities in playing my part in contributing to running Exetel in two different countries. But over the past five days I think I have made some very solid contributions to assisting our Sri Lankan company continue to develop positively. Perhaps the 9 pages of notes that constitute the future actions we need to take with the Sri Lankan company can illustrate just what is involved in playing a part in managing an affiliated company in a third world country.
We have achieved a great deal over the past four years in Sri Lanka in offering Australian customers a much higher level of of service than we could ever have done by operating a call centre in Australia and, moving forward, we will now be able to offer a level of customer support that is unheard of in Australia by any of our competitors. Don't believe me? Let me assure you that by any measure any sensible person can think of this will be true. "Out sourcing" cannot bring this about. "Australian call centre personnel" cannot bring this about - nor can "CEO" delegated "we will change" 'dictats' bring this about. What Exetel has accomplished in Sri Lanka over the past four years can actually make this happen.
But then you have to be as tough minded, resilient, deadly focused and as kind hearted as Exetel's directors have always been to make this happen. Or, of course, maybe "I'm dreamin".
Exetel looks, at least to me at 10 pm in Sri Lanka on Thursday 7th 2020, to be in better shape than it has been since we started this 'new direction' some seven years ago. Only time will tell whether this assessment is 'true'.
However, we now need to make the maniacal drive out to the airport to catch our 1 am flight to Singapore which is, as always, a total PITA to allow us to return home by the weekend. International travel is just so glamorous.....not.
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