John Linton We completed the work required to bring the new mobile 'bundled' offer to completion yesterday. We will activate the user facilities order form and send an email advice to all ADSL customers later this morning and will then 'fine tune' the processes of responding to customer questions and make whatever changes are then required to the internal processes that become necessary. As someone who has never been able to work out why anyone (let alone the 95% or whatever the percentage actually is that buys mobile services) actually buys 'capped' mobile plans, I will be interested to see what effect these offers have.
It is an interesting 'side comment' on the current state of the residential ADSL market that a company like Exetel has to provide a mobile service at its cost price to attempt to "sell" (I should really say "give away") a residential mobile service to a customer to maintain them buying a residential ADSL service that, itself, barely breaks even. Doubtless this is because of our limited purchasing power (because of our low volumes) but after almost seven years in business you would have thought that we could have achieved some slightly better level of stability than we have been able to do. I suppose when you set out to make very little money you could look at this current result as succeeding very well in realising your business objectives - and I certainly do recognise that aspect of the current business scenarios in that light as far as Exetel is concerned. I wonder whether similar conditions exist in other communications providers at the moment?
We will move our attention to finalising the re-vamping of the small business ADSL and associated services today and tomorrow. We have almost 10,000 small businesses using our services - mainly residential ADSL for business services (at least they have signed up under a company name and an ABN) but over 500 using the full business ADSL services. We have never made any attempt to promote these services per se but these users are a very stable percentage of our user base - very low churn away (less than 3% a year) and very high 'ARPU'....over $90.00 per month on average including all additional services (hosting, email, SMS etc).
One of the reasons this is much harder to do than addressing residential 'challenges' is that this market sector is not very interested in 'gigabytes' or even price - they are mainly interested in things that make their business more efficient and effective and in support when things go wrong - especially when the thing that goes wrong is "their fault". Such users don't want "residential support" they want one on one technical consulting to fix whatever they have 'broken' and they want it quickly and at an expert level. Perhaps the reason for this marketplace being so much 'easier' to deal with than the residential marketplaces is that they really understand the value of support and understand that it needs to be paid for and can't simply be given away along with a terabyte of data and a support phone line that takes over an hour before someone with no real technical skill or knowledge picks it up.
How long, or even whether, we can provide a 'perfect' small business solution for this type of user remains to be seen. We have developed a lot of the add on products that any small business would need (based on the products we developed for ourselves) and we have also built the support platform that allows us to provide the in depth technical support that is an essential element for small businesses. It will now be a very interesting challenge to see if we can truly differentiate a 'small business' ADSL/DSL service that is both effective and is seen to be affordable by the markets we target.....as well as being so much better than the "small business services" offered by other providers.
I am looking forward to today's work load.........something I rarely do lately.
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