Saturday, October 16. 2010A Very 'Busy' WeekJohn Linton The week since we returned from Sri Lanka has passed in the proverbial 'flash'....as I suppose it does for any busy person n any occupation. The major activity of the week was the 'launch' of the change from providing mobile services to Exetel customers from Vodafone's network to the Optus network. This was a very complex set of processes and not all of them have been completed though the first 80 or so orders from existing Exetel customers have been processed and the first orders from new customers began to be processed on Friday afternoon when the first of nine order forms went live. Far too early to say how this difficult decision will work out but we will keep a close eye on what happens over the balance of October. Another major time demand was the re-vamping of the smaller business services in terms of the individual services themselves and the pricing and support of them. This 'project' will take some weeks to complete particularly as to how the 'consulting' services are provided and how support is built in to the different products and services. We had several brief meetings and have begun on the changes to the web site in draft form and will make some of the more interesting decisions next week. In the mean time the first small business hosting 'package' was sold by one of the newly appointed 'out bound' business sales reps in Sri Lanka yesterday. We also began the processes required to more rapidly develop the growth of our volume of VoIP business customers and we completed the development of the second version of the customer control facilities for the rapidly increasing in popularity Hosted PABX service we have been offering for the past few months - it is a beautiful and elegant piece of software. The marketplace for providing a whole range of VoIP services to small and medium sized businesses is immense - almost certainly the greatest opportunity in today's Australian communication marketplaces - and we need to move much faster than we are at the moment. We will begin the personnel recruiting process next week in Australia and also devise a new sales training program for VoIP services for all of our corporate sales personnel to be run in the new calendar year. October is always a very good month for 'corporate' sales for many reasons. The first half of October has been stronger than any previous month this year and the qualified 'prospect lists' for sales by the end of the month are equally stronger than at any time in the current calendar year. Two of the sales people on lower quotas are already well over 200% for the month and sales are strong across all elements of the sales forces - always something that promotes a cheerful atmosphere around the office.nDepending on how sales go in October we will probably aim to break the record for the most sales made in a month in November......maybe reach three figures for the first time in a single month? We are beginning to commence our build out of the next phase of the corporate network with orders placed for the first of the high end switches and routers signed off to be done next week - this is to duplicate the PoPs in Melbourne and Brisbanne. We also looked at the preliminary costings for new PoPs in New Zealand, the USA and the EU and will now get firm quotes and begin the process of developing the business plans for each of those locations. So a lot of work was done which, as usual, just highlighted how much more work needs to be done. That's business life of course which like any other sort of 'life' never has enough time to complete all the required actions in any given day. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Friday, October 15. 2010Good Supervisors Are Required To Build Good Small Businesses.....John Linton .......but good managers of people are required to build good bigger businesses. We held our October board meeting yesterday and noted the easing in 'pressure' of the effects of the Telstra/etc marketing campaigns on our overall residential business results continue to be more than offset by the increased revenues (and therefore profits) from business data links and VoIP services. We had a particularly nice white and red wine which I couldn't participate in due to the ongoing effects from my violent illness in Sri Lanka some three plus months ago. It was a very pleasant lunch and we covered all the usual topics noting the general slight improvements that had been achieved over the past month due to our concentrated efforts. Our main preoccupation at this board meeting was the continuing personnel expansion of Exetel in both Sri Lanka and Australia. Depending, of course, on what happens in the Australian market places we will need to acquire some 60 - 70 people over the coming 9 - 10 months which is a very, very difficult thing to do of itself (we currently have around 100 people which have taken us almost 7 years to acquire).The real problem is acquiring/promoting the managers this growth will require which our particular flat business structure makes more difficult to develop than more wasteful structures or different personnel acquisition processes. I have referred to this problem in the past but, obviously, have done nothing sensible about it and, despite my fervent wishes the problem didn't "just go away". We discussed this and related issues for some time yesterday without making any more progress than we have made in the past - none. There is a possibility that we are being a bit too 'precious' in our definitions of what constitutes a good 'manager' but, even if we are, there remain pretty difficult situations to overcome. Whatever is wrong with our current views and attitudes we now have no more 'shillying shallying' time. We agreed to at least start our personnel expansion program 'immediately' so that we can make more rapid progress towards completing the overall changes to Exetel's business by the end of 2011. These changes include quadrupling our Australian VoIP sales and business support personnel and doubling our current Australian data link sales force as well as building three new outbound sales teams in Sri Lanka and adding two new Sri Lankan support groups......very, very ambitious and very, very difficult. Acquiring personnel can never been done in a hurry and it is the most difficult of all business activities.We have been fortunate in the calibre of people we have 'acquired' to date and even more fortunate in our very, very high retention rates. We will need to use different methodologies than those we have so successfully employed to date to acquire/train the sorts of people we need now and I, for one, am not at all sure how to go about these tasks. It will be interesting to see whether we can maintain those two key attributes as we attempt to grow the number of people that comprise Exetel. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Thursday, October 14. 2010Data Usage Via Mobile PhonesJohn Linton We 'launched' the bundled mobile telephone offering yesterday afternoon and received the first orders some 20 minutes after the emails to Exetel's current customers started to go out. We have no idea how 'successful' or otherwise this initiative will be but it seemed to be an essential first step in countering the Telstra 'bundling assault' that we, and every other ISP has been subjected to and will continue to be subjected to between now and Christmas. One of the interesting scenarios will be just how much data is used by this type of customer. Exetel's current customers average increasingly less than 1 gbyte of combined downloads and uploads of data. However the current users are predominantly desk top or laptop based wireless broadband users....we have relatively few mobile hand set based wireless users. I have tried to keep track of wireless use in the USA and the UK/EU over the past three years and the latest article containing some information on use in the USA fortuitously appeared this morning: This was interesting because it indicates that US users download less than 500 mbytes a month with a big discrepancy between iPhone users and Android users. In Australia, from what I can gather, iPhone users dominate the market. Not that it currently concerns Exetel but it may do in the future. I have always wondered what an Australian average is of wireless broadband usage. I don't seem to be able to find any sort of believable figures anywhere so if anyone can point me to some I would be very grateful. We have yet to put in place a more reasonable deal with Optus for the provision of wireless broadband services generally and we have doubts whether we will be able to do so in the immediate future based on the zero progress to date. There may be a possibility of another option and I think that would need to become a reality for Exetel to continue to try and provide a residential wireless service beyond the end of this calendar year. Perversely, there are the first signs of our business wireless broadband services beginning to become of real interest to some very large customers....but based on the quality of the service and the ancillary services (back end control portal, grouping usage etc) rather than "a zillion megabytes for three and a half cents." We will track the progress of this 'bundled' initiative very carefully over the balance of this month to see not only what sort of customers take advantage of it but what usage they make of the data components - both the free sites and the non-free sites. It is an interesting concept that Optus has come up with and, while I don't understand it at all, I will be interested in the analysis once we have some reasonable volume of data. I have no idea what to expect as this type of user is completely unknown to me. I don't think we have got the 'marketing message' remotely correct for the bundled mobile services but we will straighten that out over the next 7 - 10 days. Our lack of knowledge and experience in this sort of "marketing" is woeful and it's quite possible we will not get it 'right' no matter how many attempts we make. However it is far too early to say whether we will meet our objective of achieving a 10% take up rate from our current ADSL base between now and the end of December. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Wednesday, October 13. 2010The Prospect Of An Enjoyable DayJohn 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. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Tuesday, October 12. 2010New Situations Generally Need New Perspectives......John Linton ......and despite the punishing nature of spending a week in Sri Lanka (especially the journey to and from Colombo) it usually 'revives' my abilities to think slightly differently or, more simply put, it almost always allows slightly new perspectives on issues that were posing more problems than they should before spending time on completely different issues in a completely different environment.....and it has proven to be the case this time. We will now attempt to put three new initiatives in place by the end of this week or at least make the decisions that will begin to change several aspects of our business. The most 'immediate' change will be to begin promoting the Optus mobile retail plans to our current ADSL customers and shortly after that to new ADSL customers. This is, in some ways, a very big change for us because we seldom 'leave' a supplier and we have used the same mobile service provider since mid 2004 when we first began to offer mobile services. We have also 'stubbornly' maintained since that time our 'need' to create our own plans rather than reselling a carrier's retail plans which is a real major change for us. However the circumstances in the current ADSL residential marketplaces are now so different we could no longer continue with those previous policies. Sad - but necessary. The second thing is to put more emphasis on the smaller business services via a revamp of that section of the web site, new pricing, new services and building a new small business outbound sales force very much along the lines of the corporate sales force we have been building since late February 2009. This will obviously take longer than just changing mobile suppliers (though that is by no means as easy as I have made it sound) but with a bit of concentration that should 'get under way' before too much more time elapses. It will be interesting to enter a brand new marketplace for Exetel for the first time almost since we began business. The third thing that we need to make an almost immediate start on is to expand the business network beyond Australia to New Zealand, the USA and to the UK/EU. We have been turning away an increasing amount of business each month from Australian based companies that want links to these countries and, more lately, overseas companies operating in Australia that want their Australian operations, often in multiple locations, linked back to their head offices. In my ignorance I had always dismissed these opportunities as being too expensive to invest in with little prospect of reaching break even in any realistic time. Now that Steve has looked in to it (following our buying our own bandwidth between Australia and Sri Lanka last year) it turns out to be much more manageable than I ever considered it could be. Then there is the fourth growth path of quadrupling our efforts in providing VoIP services to small and large businesses which we will now put in place by hiring more VoIP personnel specialising in VoIP sales and support with the objective of duplicating the current level of revenue from ADSL services by June 2012. Of all the projects - this looks the easiest to accomplish - but that is possibly because we have spent more than four years refining just what we can offer in VoIP services and have 'pioneered' more VoIP related applications than any other communications provider within our own operations. So, three/four 'projects' to initiate and then manage towards success simultaneously as well as the daily demands of the current businesses brings new perspectives to daily working life. After all the dreariness of the last 18 months of residential gigabyte give aways, business life looks more and more attractive and exciting again. PS: I smiled when I read this - feeling 'smug' that we had the forethought to actually build a company based on web functionality from 'day one' and it has resulted in the best possible customer facilities of any company I have ever looked at: Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Monday, October 11. 2010A Wild And Extremely Windy Day In Sydney.......John Linton ....in terms of the weather anyway - hopefully it will be much calmer in business attributes. I slept well past my usual 'getting up time' this morning due to the residual jet lag of time shifting five and a half hours 'backwards' for the past week and just the general tiredness generated by awkward travel connections and packing a lot of additional work in to a short time frame. One or two incidents on the trip have reminded me that I no longer have the immense capacities for staying awake with a mind that functions correctly as I used to do. I think I've finally reached my limit in that respect. Perhaps the only amazing thing is that it has lasted this long. I checked my 'diary' which is mercifully 'uncrowded' except for a few appointments with some relatively interesting people and catching up on the projects that I deferred most work on for a week while I was away. One thing has become a constant in Australian communications life over the past 18 months or so is the constant change and the constant increase in that rate of change that ensures that almost any planning that you do is rendered pointless in shorter and shorter time frames. I'm not sure what we would do if we didn't have razor sharp company objectives and the flexibility of mind (and possibly extensive knowledge) to deal with the multiplicity of 'challenges' with which we have been and are being confronted over recent months. I will be interested to see whether I notice any differences having been away for a week. The major 'activities' that we have to try and complete before the end of January is the complete 're-vamp' of small business business services and develop ways of direct selling them rather than continuing to use our 'passive marketing' via our web site. It seems pretty easy to say you will 'turn on' another marketplace but the actuality is there is a great deal of quite complex work involved to specify the products, devise the sales stories, create the application, provisioning and support services and, by no means least, recruit and train the people, select the management and make it happen generally.....while you are locked in a 'death struggle' with your current two major marketplaces. Perhaps overly dramatic descriptions of what has to be done - but pretty much along those lines and in those circumstances. If that is the case why do it? Well - "no real option" springs immediately to mind. The residential marketplaces are already trashed and will continue to become even more trashed when both iinet and TPG realise just what Telstra is planning to do or realises, if they don't already, that Telstra is deadly serious in successfully carrying out their plans to reef back 10% plus of the current ADSL and associated wire line revenues they have previously lost. That 10% turns in to more like 20% when you 'count the cost' of reducing the ARPU those other companies are currently achieving as they try and ward off the Telstra attempts using their massive and, in real terms, inexhaustible funding they are making and will make available to achieve their targets. So, no 'joy' is likely to be forthcoming in the residential ADSL marketplaces in the foreseeable future other than lower revenue per customer and increased costs per customer.....and, for everyone but Telstra...... less customers. No difference to what Telstra needs, not wants, to achieve. Maybe I'm seeing it all wrong. But if I'm vaguely correct every dollar spent on 'residential' promotion by non-Telstra sources is an additional dollar wasted by the spenders and will make absolutely no difference in the face of Telstra's onslaught. In those circumstances, should they be true, the only solution is to try a marketplace or two to which bulk advertising and 'free' gigabytes aren't remotely relevant. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Sunday, October 10. 2010You Tend To See Things A Little Differently......John Linton ......after you return home - that doesn't seem to work for me....it all looks depressingly the same - except where it has become worse. We returned to Australia last night without incident and caught up with the various personal and Australian news that has been missing from life for a week. It was a pleasant enough evening and now morning but, after the tropics, it felt quite cold to some of us who registered their displeasure at the sudden temperature drop in unusual ways. I hadn't bothered to read the Australian telecommunication media while I was away, it was some relief to get away from its boring and repetitive content for a while, but I scanned this late last night which made me smile: You have to go right to the very last line to actually pick up the 'negotiation' but it is so transparent it's laughable. Not that I personally think that there is anything wrong with using wireless as a mainstream telephone and data service but Telstra would think its all their birthdays and Christmases come at once to swap out the extraordinarily expensive tag ends of the PSTN (imposed on them by the USO at an enormous cost) for a small extension of their wireless network....seems fair enough to me....and of course there is no other option. In fact the phrase "no other option" is going to be coming out of Julia Faustus' mouth quite a lot over the time she remains promoting the 'NBN2'. From the other papers I scanned it seems that Faustus and co are lurching ever further towards a communist state with Tasmania imposing a "you will accept the 'NBN2' or its you for the Labor Re-indoctrination Camps with other States mandated to follow or it's "Federal Enforcement For Them". And this coercion is for a scheme that every Australian is delighted to be happening? Surely there is some sort of mis-deception if people are going to be coerced to accept something that they don't want - or at least don't want at this time? Well "democracy" has a whole new meaning in Australia now so perhaps this new meaning includes communism where 'the party' dictates what is good for the proletariat and the union thugs look after the re-indoctrination of those proles who disagree with anything the 'party' says is the way it's going to be. Personally I couldn't care less whether the new Whitlams are going to throw away ever more billions of borrowed dollars on searches for mare's nests - two country clowns have imposed Ms Faustus on us instead of the usual rabble carrying out that task but the result will be the same - could there ever be any more loony prime minister than Krudd? Bet your life there can be. ......she 'supported Krudd' in everything he did, vocally, until she stabbed him in the back at the first opportunity and made a deal with her Mephistopheles - presumably on the basis that after a career in the unions what you would have left as a 'soul' wouldn't actually be worth anything. I think it sets something of a new 'dimension' in waste - promising faster games playing to 18 year olds to try and win an iffy election - a new low, lower than Krudd attempted with his 39 direct lies, in any sort of standards? Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Saturday, October 9. 2010Back To Australia TodayJohn Linton It's a quarter to six in the morning and our plane leaves at seven. We have spent most of a day in Singapore due to our flight from Colombo missing the 7 am flight by half an hour despite leaving at 1 am in the morning. It is never unpleasant to spend a day in Singapore which, next to Tokyo, must be the cleanest and brightest city in the world. We didn't do much except walk to the new casino with the ship on top of its three towers and do a bit of shopping. Due some quirk of fate/undeserved reward the hotel allocated us a huge suite (and I mean huge) with a full sized lounge room, huge dining room, bedroom as large as I've ever seen plus two bathrooms, dressing room and kitchen! We will get back to Australia in today's early evening and 'digest' what we have planned for Sri Lanka over the coming months - to improve the way the Australian residential 'marketing' works and to begin a new approach to the SME marketplaces we have acquired without any real effort. We have some 4,000 SME customers and we have not really attempted to provide those users with the obvious facilities for a small business user other than by default. We will now make a much greater effort because it seems simpler to provide more facilities that our competitors would find it difficult to do than to continue trying to compete with 'terabyte' plans for $A30.00 a month or whatever they will become before Christmas. I was informed yesterday that we had sold our 500th EOC business service (in addition to the fibre and SHDL services we sell where EOC is not available - only 120 or so exchanges). That is a pretty remarkable effort for a company of our size and, subject to checking with our supplier, I would think that's more than anyone else has accomplished including the supplier's own business sales teams.....I must find out for sure. It's a very solid example of what can be accomplished when you see the writing on the wall for a major aspect of your business and plan to address that issue. If we hadn't attempted, and largely succeeded in building a corporate sales force things wouldn't look too bright for Exetel right now. Corporate sales, although it's in its 'infancy' for Exetel is now producing more 'profit' than residential sales and is in fact supporting the pricing of the very low/unprofitable depths residential pricing has reached - without corporate sales we possibly wouldn't still be in the residential business. Some things to further consider on the flight home are just how we will now build our SME business in similar ways to which we we built our corporate business. We can't do it in the same way but we can attempt to do it it in different ways.....using the Sri Lanka company personnel and the knowledge we have built up over the past few years in both 'marketing' and the services that are valuable to small businesses - VoIP, SMoIP, FoIP, SMS via keyboard etc - which our competitors aren't able to supply as seamlessly as we can. Food for thought as to just how to make this happen...... ....then again I have an awful habit of just sleeping through any length flight. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Friday, October 8. 2010Saying Goodbye To Sri Lanka...AgainJohn 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. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010
Thursday, October 7. 2010Last 'Full Day' In Sri Lanka.....John Linton ....as tomorrow we have to catch our 1.30 am Friday morning flight to Singapore. Annette has almost finished the personnel reviews and I have only got an hour or so of wrapping up the general directions of the SL company over the coming months to do tomorrow. I still think that the Sri Lankan operation can be the 'perfect company' that exceeds 'world's best practices' in every aspect of its operations. It would be really good to participate in the creation of such an entity rather than doing anything else in commercial life. We spent some time today trying to determine just how we could measure the SL company's performance against meaningful, impartial, 'yard sticks' that would show each person within the SL operation just how good the company they worked for actually is in terms of its minute by minute performance. We came up with a number of good ideas of how this could be done and between now and the end of calendar 2010 we believe we can put those impartial measurements in place. It always surprises me, and always has, that I can actually be part of something that is so much better than anything else I can observe in my journey through commercial life. Perhaps that''s because I have always assumed that everyone else was so much better in every respect than I have ever been or the companies I have worked for/participate in have ever been. At the end of this, 10th or so, formal review of the SL operation I actually am becoming more convinced that there is no higher standard of commercial and societal achievement any where else across the globe. That is obviously something that is very hard to believe and I may be completely wrong - I often am. However the more stringently we apply performance measures to Exetel in this country the more obvious it it that the operation in Colombo is something very special. Between now and when we leave tomorrow we will determine just how we can put in place the metrics that demonstrate just how significant the performance of this small commercial entity is by "world standards". We were thinking of using a metric that divides the total number of fault tickets in any month by the number of TIO complaints and the number of formal replies to closed tickets of customer dissatisfaction and also the number of 'praise' responses on closed tickets. This would give a relatively clear view of how well the SL operation handles the 6,000 or so 'complaints' our 125,000 or so customers register each month. The current measurements show that less than one half of one percent of customers who have some problem with some aspect of their Exetel service are unhappy with how their problem was dealt with.....pretty impressive. There are all sorts of other measurement we already have in place for the overll peration of the services we deliver but almost all of them do not relate to the specific activities of the SL company (mrtg, dns and other bitty bytey things). Measuring service performance beyond the obvious simplistic metrics is much more difficult. Exetel Sri Lanka is a very special commercial enterprise. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Wednesday, October 6. 2010Second Day Of Sri Lankan ReviewJohn Linton We now have 51 personnel working in the Colombo office and the operation is beginning to 'mature' as an overall company as it continues in to its third year of operation in the World Trade Centre offices as opposed to the 18 months of operating as two then four work from home support engineers it was before that. One of the highlights was presenting two of the inbound sales people with their first sapphires for making 500 residential sales so far this year.It is a pretty good achievement in the circumstances that have prevailed this year and several other members of the inbound sales team will almost certainly reach their targets before the end of this calendar year. Exetel has moved a long way from having no sales people as it did for the first, over, five years of its existence to having 30 out of its, almost, 100 employees today (ten in SL and 20 in Australia). Current plans will gradually move the percentage of sales personnel within the company from around 30% to over 60% by the end of 2012/beginning of 2013 as we continue to find new ways of dealing with the changing conditions in the Australian marketplace and continue to move towards a business model that will meet the different demands of the second decade of the 21st century - always assuming that we are able to do that of course. Listening to the SL sales girls/ladies dealing with incoming enquiries is a pleasure (when not in meetings I sit close to them). The knowledge they display and the 'sweetness' of temperament, courtesy and voice timbre with which they deal with the people calling in is quite extraordinary. When we moved to the new offices earlier this year we fitted the floor out to house 95 simultaneous 'seated' employees and reserved the remaining 20% of the empty floor space on a first refusal basis to be take within 2 years. The extra space would give us room for 120 people without 'hot desking'. When we took the additional space the WTC (East tower where we are) was barely, if that, half full. Now it seems to have filled up very rapidly with new tenants taking whole floors or in at least one case multiple floors as the positive effects of ending the civil war filter through to the international business community. There is a lot more building work going on around the central areas of Colombo and even more solid rumours that the new freeway to the airport may be completed within my life time. We finished reviewing most of the current issues yesterday (less than 2 or so hours needs to be spent on the remaining issues) and will begin revising the CY 2011 business plan today with the aim of finishing it by tomorrow. We will concentrate mainly on the areas of outbound sales, programming services and higher and wider levels of support. We will also discuss how best we can supply call centre services for other companies as we are getting a slightly increasing number of 'nibbles' each month in Australia from 'semi serious' enquirers (I am excluding the idiots who think we are stupid enough to give them information on what we have learned). One of the semi serious enquiries was from a company that wanted to look at us undertaking a 2 year contract to establish and manage a 350 seat call centre in the WTC for them. Early days but it a 'core expertise' we now have that very few other people/companies possess. So, while none of these opportunities may prove to be realities they are solid indications of how we need to change the current operations of the company moving forward to address the difficulties currently extant in the Australian marketplaces and the even greater difficulties that will come in to existence over the next 12 to 18 months. It should be an interesting day. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Tuesday, October 5. 2010Artificial Intelligence A Pipe Dream Of The Stupid......John Linton ....or an amazing aspect of the future of end user support.....take your pick.....and the majority, by a very long way vote for the former. We began the main part of the SL reviews today with Annette beginning the one to one discussions with each one of the SL personnel and me starting the 'analysis' of what was happening in the overall SL operations. Anybody vaguely associated with being a part of the running of any commercial operation would understand how bad or good such processes can be. If you are aware of these processes then I need say no more and if you aren't then there is no amount of detail that can make it any clearer. The most enjoyable part of the day was the hour or so where the AI program that Exetel is funding at SLIT was updated via the people undertaking the research. The progress is now tangible and we will begin to see how it can actually become integrated in to our, or anyone else's support and sales processes over the coming months. We had a brief demonstration of how the base engine is currently operating which is little more than a refined version of the pattern recognition that we 'bought' commercially some 5 -6 years ago but at least it is now 'our' code and the two levels beyond word/syllable pattern recognition will become available to this process. Our five year objective, like our objective for the past 7 years, is to develop an intelligent front end to our telephone 'human' services that will filter out the need for human beings to be involved in something like 75% of the questions asked of any support/sales/provisioning facility. If this proves possible then the cost of providing support to any company's end users reduces by 75% from whatever it is without an AI function. We have been working on this assumption for almost ten years now and have not got very far but we now seem to be on the road to achieving this self evident goal. It has always been evident that it required the intellectual rigour and sharpness of intellect that we had been unable to bring to it on our little better than part time basis we were able to devote to it. By funding the 'professorship and the associate researchers/programmers we have been able to see some real progress over the past six months. We will now engage Exetel customers in 'populating' the "unanswerable" question logs of the infant data base so that we can move beyond the current concepts of pattern recognition to the more sensible levels of 'intelligent' discussion. If we can progress beyond this point we will begin the process of moving a text to text process to a voice to voice process with the objective of having a computer to human initial base answer service to all of our human based telephone support and sales functions by the end of 2011. Eliminating 50% of the repetitive, and dumb, questions before a human has to be bored by the drudgery of answering them will be a key factor in improving the experience of being a CSR in the call centres of the future. Scary stuff. But more sensible than: Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 Monday, October 4. 2010Do You Ever Really Believe What Anyone Says To You......John Linton .....Does anyone ever actually tell you anything resembling the unvarnished and complete truth or do they just say what they believe you want to hear or what they want you to believe? I seldom believe much of what people say to me in business these days as 'spin' (a silly euphemism for 'lying') is embedded so deeply in every aspect of public, and even more sadly, private utterance'.....or so it seems to me. We started the work planned for the Sri Lankan reviews at a leisurely pace - partly because of the mild jet lag and general tiredness induced by a difficult travel itinerary but mostly because we hadn't planned to do much on this wet and, comparatively cool day. I don't know how other people cope with looking at a rapidly changing operation that has multiple facets and trying to make helpful decisions and suggestions on a three monthly basis but I always find it very difficult and a quite significant set of cultural differences doesn't make it any easier. We got up late and didn't get to the office till almost 11 am and only spent enough time there to say hello to the weekend shift personnel. We met with the two Australians who are currently in Colombo in the afternoon for a brief up date but other than that did very little. Perhaps it's advancing age but it takes me longer than it used to, or as I remember it used to, to become 'up to speed' with a very different environment which is a contributor to why I tend to give myself a day after a long trip before trying to do any real work over the past two years or so. I did re-check the agenda for the next four days and added several things that need to be discussed following the meeting with the two Australian 'knowledge transferers' but other than that I was still pre-occupied with 'Australian issues' which is a pretty obvious indication that trying to think in depth about SL issues is not yet going to be very sensible. The major difficulty we face at this particular time is really just how to form a correct set of views as to exactly where the SL operation is at. We can look at the mechanisms we have put in place to determine various efficiencies and performances (call queue times, email response times, customer satisfaction levels) in simplistic terms but, despite all of the feedback mechanisms we have in place (forum, suggestion box, complaint process, resolution process etc) it is impossible, at least for me, to get a real assessment as to where the SL operation has progressed to and what now needs to be done. Some of the things I heard this afternoon really worried me as do some of the more emphatically stated issues that are occasionally brought to my attention by various methodologies when I am in Australia. So a lot of my personal thinking and much of my discussions about the quarterly reviews I have with Annette on the trip to Colombo and then our talks once we are here involve trying to understand not only what different people here tell us but what we actually observe in terms of the different people and the differences in attitudes we notice from trip to trip. We pick up most of this 'information' from the personnel with whom we talk with both formally and informally but we also pick up views from our accountants and lawyers and, of course, from the university personnel on the different aspects of our involvements there. Having said that - neither I nor Annette seem to really get a reliable view of what is happening within the SL operation - or at least we haven't on the trips made so far which are now in double figures. Hopefully we'll have more luck this time....though probably that is just one more instance of the triumph of hope over experience. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010
Sunday, October 3. 2010Back In Colombo....John Linton ....after the usual slog from Sydney to Singapore, 2 hour transit, then the 3.5 hour flight on to Colombo airport followed by the usual terrifying 40+ minute trip via darkened streets and maniacal traffic/drivers in pouring rain to the hotel. However the usual pluses of Singapore airlines impeccable service in every respect and a bonus of zero people in front of us at immigration and our bags were on the carousel almost as soon as we cleared the formalities. It is not an easy trip and you end up in your room at the equivalent of 5.30am in the morning having been traveling since 1.00 pm the previous afternoon - all being well. We will get some sleep now and start the first aspects of the agenda later this morning (Colombo time where it is now 1.20 am). Such trips are never really wasted as there is time without emails or other interruptions to think about all sorts of things - most of which are to do with some aspect of Exetel and the industry or the people inside and outside the company.....the penalty for having all your personal money tied up in a business operating in the toughest conditions I have ever seen in the industry in all the decades I have been associated with it.......there are no "long weekends" for such foolish people. But there are the rewards of gaining satisfaction in keeping the company you are associated with not only 'alive' but growing faster than the vast majority of your competitors by the efforts of the people who work to make Exetel an ever more efficient and competitive entity (and without achieving 'growth' by simply borrowing money to buy out other companies - though I envy the companies that can do that). The main things that crossed my mind as I dozed away the travel time were all to do with how we could change our position in the residential marketplaces we operate in and how we could more quickly grow the results we are achieving in the corporate marketplaces we have established some presence in over the past eighteen months. While I didn't reach any new decisions on how either of these two objectives could be reached it has helped emphasise that we have to totally change our 'ways to market' in residential services and to do far more in the development of suitable services for the corporate marketplaces. Easy to 'say' - not so easy to make plans to actually deliver results. What is true is that our revenues would be double what they are today if we had ever 'bothered' to include wire line rental and call charges in our offerings - they could be treble if we had pursued a mobile provision policy that included simply re-selling a carrier's retail services for a commission. What is equally true is that we would have made far more progress in more rapidly growing our number of corporate customers if we had more sales personnel with a better 'story' than the one that has worked so relatively well so far. I hadn't actually ever looked at either issue in those particular ways before; you often miss the obvious when you are involved in too much daily detail, so it is something to work on over the balance of October. I have never been very interested in 'copying' but in these very tough times perhaps it isn't the worst idea to simply do what 'everyone else does' for a year or so while the current different scenarios play out and the 'tectonic shifts' grind their way to whatever conclusion they are going to produce. Either that or 'start from scratch' by assuming that Exetel is back in January 2004 and look at what you would now do if you were just entering both those markets. Time for sleep. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010
Saturday, October 2. 2010Another Very 'Interesting' Week......John Linton ....in Australian communications land in which we ended one month/quarter and started the next month/quarter which just re-emphasises just how 'one day at a time' the Australian communications business has become over the past two years. Annette and I will be leaving for the airport in a few hours time to do the quarterly personnel and overall company reviews in Colombo next week. So many people say how wonderful it must be to be able to spend so much time each year in such a tropical paradise which would be true if we ever managed to go to the tropical paradise type places - which we don't. It's a tiring trip taking some 17 hours (including the hour or so stop over ) from 'door to door' and involves landing in Colombo at around midnight - facing the 45 minute 'nightmare' drive to the hotel, working constantly for a few days (which involves a 30 second walk from the front door of the hotel to the office building via a covered walk way) and then leaving the hotel at around midnight and having another 'nightmare' drive back to the airport. On one trip in the past getting on for three years we took a Sunday off to visit the elephant orphanage and, even with a careful hotel driver spent most of the trip with our eyes firmly averted from the road or the surrounding countryside due to the perpetual mayhem that is driving on Sri Lankan roads (we saw at least one fatal accident and several more multiple vehicle collisions that must have resulted in injuries of various severity). It's certainly true that everyone we meet is exceptionally friendly and helpful in every way and the views from our room over the presidential palace and the port and Indian Ocean are exceptional - as are the views from our 'new' offices on the 25th floor of the Columbo version of the WTC. However Colombo is no-one's idea of a 'tropical paradise' and the working day is the same and as long in Sri Lanka as it is here. Having said all that; it is still still highly enjoyable to visit the Colombo operation and talk through the issues first hand and plan for the future growth of the various operations there. The main purpose of the trip this time is to review the completion of 'Phase Two' of our presence in Sri Lanka and the start of 'Phase Three'. 'Phase One' comprised the actual establishment of the physical presence (with all the multitude of events and tasks that involves) and the even harder tasks of recruiting and training the personnel. It took the best part of a year to do that. The next 18 months, 'Phase Two', comprised the ever more detailed knowledge transfer, the ongoing recruiting to a level of 50 people, and the transfer of almost all management of the day to day operations to Sri Lankan personnel - that phase is now, subject to the reviews over the next few days, largely complete. If I ever took the time to review what we have achieved in the now almost five years since we took the decision in a North Sydney restaurant over probably too much red wine to "see what could be done in Sri Lanka" I would be very happy with just how much has been accomplished over that time - I must do that one day - in the mean time I remain too involved in the day to day issues involved in such a difficult set of tasks. 'Phase Three' of the development of the Sri Lankan company is to make it 'financially self sufficient' in terms of generating revenue other than what Exetel Australia pays it to provide 'back end services'. This has already started in a very small way with the recruitment of programmers who do some of the work on the contract programming services we offer in Australia as well as the development of key software for our Australian VoIP, FoIP and SMoIP services. That will continue to grow as we provide contract programming services to more Australian and New Zealand companies - if we become more successful in that endeavour. That is an ongoing, very long term aspect of the SL company and one we can't "rush" in any way. The two key areas for the SL company to acquire its own revenue are to provide out bound calling service to Exetel and to provide back end support services to other Australian and New Zealand, and perhaps UK, companies. How and in what time frames this is to be accomplished will be the most important topics for discussion over the coming week. Surprisingly, we have had more than a dozen enquiries over the past two years from ISPs smaller than Exetel to provide provisioning and technical support services to them on a contract basis. (Even more surprisingly, we had one casual enquiry from an ISP much larger than we were/are). We have never pursued those enquiries because we weren't, remotely, ready to provide such services at the times we received them but now we could seriously consider doing that. Sure the 'confidentiality issues' need to be addressed but they, in all reality, are totally trivial - as are the logistics. However 'exciting' the possibilities of providing back end services to other companies may be the development of an outbound sales operation in Sri Lanka for Exetel's residential business, and for one key function of our corporate business remains our highest priority. Not being a TFI I do understand the various issues relating to this difficult scenario (I have personally built sales forces selling highly technical products from the ground up several times). We have spent the last eighteen months building a corporate out bound sales force in Australia which is, by several third parties of different 'persuasions', regarded as being more than highly successful.....although we did it totally differently to any other company in our industry. Our plans are to do something quite similar, but in some ways quite differently, in Colombo. It will be a very interesting few days. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010 |
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