John Linton There are only three days to go until the end of the September month and therefore the first quarter of the new financial year. It will be an above planned performance for Exetel which is always good to see. The ABS are due to publish their internet usage analysis later this morning and that will be interesting to see in terms of how wireless broadband is faring and how ADSL is changing. (given the claims by Telstra and TPG of new ADSL customers added over the past 6 - 12 months it will be interesting to see what the ABS figures show in terms of ADSL growth. If you add up all of the stated growth in ADSL customers made by those companies that publish them it will be interesting to see what those same companies have reported to the ABS - my bet is there will be a discrepancy - but then I hold deeply cynical views of what some companies publish in terms of their 'progress'.
http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/allprimarymainfeatures/6445F12663006B83CA256A150079564D?opendocument
Irrespective of what the ABS figures show we need to complete any revisions to our own plans by midnight Friday. Some progress was made yesterday and we will do much of the rest of the work by COB today in broad terms. Sales across most of our product offerings have 'kicked up' sharply over the last two days (as they do every month) and if the pattern repeats itself over the next three days we will get much closer to our month end targets than looked likely mid month. Even so, September will not be a good month and that remains the point to be considered - has business, at least for us, slowed down beyond September? As we are about to increase our expenditures and investments in more rapidly developing the business markets we address this is the key 'evidence' we need to determine.
We began 'Phase IV' of our development of residential support processes in ADSL yesterday when Steve returned to Colombo to ensure the new objectives are fully understood and that the necessary capabilities will be put in place to meet the new objectives. Essentially, and from the first customer call we received on February 21st 2004 we have taken the view that our responsibilities to our customers were to ensure that we delivered a full speed service to the boundary of their property and that any issues beyond that were the customer's responsibility. In those early days we extended that responsibility to having a "green light" on the modem if we had provided the modem. We have maintained that policy for the past seven and a half years and have measured our support 'performance' against that criterion for the whole of that time.
Over that time "CPE" (customer premises equipment) has changed dramatically from a simple modem connecting one basic computer to sophisticated routers connecting to multiple devices. The old modems were very simple devices with almost no/no capability of being screwed up by the end user. Today's routers can be extremely complicated with multiple ways an end user who over estimates their technical capabilities can render the whole device unusable by what they consider a simple configuration change. Despite the assertive "I have changed nothing at my end" the plain truth is that most 'sudden' losses of ADSL service are in fact entirely due to the customer actually making a change "at his end" that caused the loss of service. So we are now returning to the way we 'fixed' sudden service loss back in the day - we are going to first check that we can see data flow from the customer's line and then the CSR, with the support of Google, will help the customer reset his/her CPE back to factory standard which we expect will solve all of the "I haven't changed anything at my end" problems. This may also be used for users who claim they "suddenly" have got lower speeds than they used to have. This is not so simple because cabling does 'decay' over time and that sort of issue is notoriously hard to pin down - we'll see what happens.
The new goal for Exetel customer support is to fix all "no service" telephone support calls within the first call - with the exceptions of when we can see that there is no data flow to the customer's network boundary point in which case we will log a fault with the carrier. Now this may not sound very significant but in terms of 'customer satisfaction' it should make a quite considerable difference in helping parents whose children have meddled with the set up and when they couldn't remedy the mess they made not told anyone and averred to their parents that "it just stopped working". It will also help the slightly older children themselves who just lie to the CSR that "nothing's changed at our end - I am a highly competent user with years of experience in my job as "xxxxxx"" fix the problem they have caused themselves.
Well, that's the theory - it will be interesting to see what actually transpires.
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