John Linton Final billing for September was up a little over 2% and total expenses were down so the very worryingly slow start to last month ended up OK - by no means brilliant - but OK. Business/corporate sales had a record day yesterday in terms of new revenue with, for us, several new very large customers signing up for IP, VPN and other significant sized services. We had the best week for residential ADSL in a long time which was more surprising. So, together with the results from July and August, the first quarter exceeded the planned targets both overall and in all but two of our service offerings which was a pleasing result. Of course all it really means is that we are under pressure to make the October targets now which are higher than the September targets by a fair way.
We have some interesting plans for the second quarter in all aspects of our business and it will be more demanding than usual. As I alluded to earlier in the week we need to progress our support objectives (Phase IV) by ratcheting up up our technical support abilities to fix all incoming technical telephone calls within the span of the first call with the only exception being if a carrier has to become involved beyond the customer's boundary point. This provides us with a new quality standard that replaces our previous quantitative statistics as the measure of how good the support provided to residential customers is. We established the initial benchmarks this week and will spend the remainder of October analysing the day by day results so that we can implement the new support standards by November 1st 2011. It will allow us to improve our residential support satisfaction levels (in the eyes of residential customers) significantly over the coming months if this 'program' is successful.
Our other major project for the coming quarter is to more rapidly develop our business/corporate sales and support functions with the objective of using the coming quarter to move significantly forward in generating and supporting a much higher number of new business and corporate customers. Apart from our own efforts and investments we may go down the path of a joint venture to build this part of Exetel's operations much more rapidly. From the limited amount we know of current methods of selling to small/medium and medium Australian business customers there are very large opportunities for any company that does it better than it is currently being done. We have reached that conclusion based on what we have been able to achieve over the past two and a half years and what our suppliers tell us about our results compared, generally, to the results achieved by their wholesale operations generally - no specifics but interesting indicators. We will complete the draft of a joint venture plan over the next 6 - 8 weeks and, in the meantime, determine what, if any, real interest another company may have in entering a 'partnership' to make this happen.
There are two other major processes/changes that we need to 'make happen' in conjunction with the two main projects one of which is the ever present reduction in our operating cost percentages while continuing to grow the company more rapidly and the other is removing the 'fat dumb and happy' personnel attitudes that have unfortunately crept in to Exetel as our personnel levels have grown and newer people have nothing like the perfectionist attitudes of our personnel who have been with us for longer periods of time and have worked directly with the early Exetel people. That is something that particularly distresses me personally but, far more importantly, is not at all helpful to Exetel as a company that wishes to continue to grow. How that can be effectively addressed is not clear to me at the moment.
So, it's a much too important day to waste on 'business' issues and time to get into the swing of real life and death things - C'arn'a Cats.
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