John Linton There is a sadness in our house this morning. We drove our youngest daughter to the airport yesterday afternoon to catch a flight to the UK where she will take up a position with IBM after working for that company for the past five years in Australia straight out of university. Of course it was long past time she should have 'left home' and it is absolutely the right thing for her to do, both personally and for her career, but there is parental sadness just the same.....tears all round in fact for much of yesterday morning especially accompanying the final hugs.
I have a strangely empty week in terms of events or projects. We will concentrate on making the first month of the new financial year a successful one and do the remaining planning for August. I would expect to spend the majority of the week on our two current longer term projects which are to develop a 'killer' small business product set offering and more tangibly measure the 'quality' of our support operations against their goal of "ensure every caller is happier at the end of your conversation with them than they were at the beginning".
As I have mentioned on several occasions small/medium business VoIP sales have grown enormously since we put that program in place and small business mobile sales are now beginning to show accelerating growth. Our business ADSL has always been relatively strong and are now working on adding the remaining services in to one business 'package' that includes optional consulting support and VoIP hardware. This will not be a 'quick' process but we have made a lot of progress since we set up the outbound sales operation in Sri Lanka with over 30 sales people in Colombo now and continual hiring an increasing number of sales people every month. An enormous amount of effort is still needed to bring everything we have planned in to successful existence but we continue t make progress.
The other ongoing major development is the ongoing improvements being made to support and associated services. When we established these services in Sri Lanka three years ago we set an objective to provide the best support and problem resolution available from any Australian communications company. We based this on paying the highest remuneration, by far, only employing stable and degree qualified personnel and delivering the best training we could to ensure that our investments in this key aspect of our business had the absolute minimum level of staff turn over as we continued to grow the number of people in each of these functions. After three years we have met each of these objectives with the average time in job now a little over two years and our personnel turnover has been maintained as less than 5% per annum.
Our customer feedback mechanisms of complaints, suggestions, forms, TIO complaints (not only do we have the lowest level of TIO complaints we have almost no Level 2 complaints and we have a net reduction in complaints quarter by quarter) and the fault handling rating survey all show positive progress. Using these different mechanisms we have seen considerable progress towards our support/problem resolution goal of 'ensure the caller is happier at the end of your call than at the beginning' and we now need to further enhance the ongoing achievement of that goal. Perhaps uniquely, Exetel's directors read every suggestion and complaint made by an Exetel customer and direct the resolution of those issues personally. We need to improve both the 'measurement' of how well we deal with all calls/emails and to integrate that process, once it is as objective as it can be made, in to the remuneration plans for all Exetel employees.
Both of these longer term projects will undoubtedly fill up any time that is available over the coming seven days.
Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011
ABN 350 979 865 46
2 - the number of suns we will have by the end of 2012?