John Linton For over seven years of providing ADSL services via Telstra's infrastructure we have eschewed providing a wire line telephone service. Although we have provided wire line telephony via the Optus infrastructure since Optus decided to offer wholesale ADSL services some five years ago but we could never see any real advantage to our customers by simply offering a similar service via Telstra - it just had no customer advantage. Things have changed recently, at least as far as Exetel is concerned, and we made an offer to our current Telstra infrastructure customers last night to transfer their land line telephone rental to Exetel and reduce, not their telephone line rental fees (we have no ability to do that) but to save on their call fees quite considerably. We also offered a five dollar reduction in their current ADSL service monthly charge if the signed up for a twelve month contract.
Very 'ho hum' in our attempts to 'enliven' our residential ADSL marketing but it does provide some advantages to those customers who don't use VoIP and assists Exetel in its 'retention' activity. It addresses the 'one bill' market place which we have never attempted to address before and for those customers that take advantage of the $5.00 ADSL plan discount it adds a 'prevention' against the Telstra Retail 'win back' campaigns that seemingly will continue into the remainder of the current financial year. So it will be interesting to see what percentage of current customers decide to take advantage of this offer over the balance of March. I don't have any significant expectations but, as one of a number of measures, I expect it to contribute to the ongoing slowing of the Telstra churn aways.
It is a somewhat pathetic start to changing the ways we offer ADSL services to different marketplaces but we have to do things like this (things different to what we have done in the past) to try and ensure our overall business targets are achieved. I wish I could say I, or other people within Exetel, have come up with a string of ideas to retain our current customers but I haven't had any breakthroughs in that direction. One vaguely interesting 'fact' is emerging - there is a small, but noticeable, increase in the number of 'ex-Exetel customers' who churned away to TPG returning to Exetel. Apparently all 'ISP Services' aren't the same after all. The other nice thing to see is the slowly increasing uptake of business customers who are buying ADSL services for their employees and the more rapidly increasing small business customers who are buying Exetel's ADSL services together with a range of other services.
One minor success we have had in attempting to retain our residential ADSL customers has been the surprising, to me, uptake of bundled mobile plans linked to a discount on the customer's ADSL service. In the relatively short time we have been offering those services almost 4% of Exetel's current ADSL customers have taken them up - some customers buying two or even three mobile services and getting substantial discounts from their ADSL plans....one customer actually getting a refund each month on his ADSL service. It seems the only way to go in improving current customer's ADSL services - providing discounts by 'bundling' other services in to the overall price but it has been something we have always avoided doing...my personal prejudices and out of date views again holding up Exetel's progress.
Maybe inspiration will strike today. Then again maybe it isn't an inspiration sort of thing. Perhaps it's just a ten million dollar advertising spend?
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