John Linton ......after the longest 'gap' since we first set up the Sri Lankan operation in January 2008.....some five months instead of the regular trip each three months....leaving a beautiful, almost hot, Sydney day in marked contrast to yesterday.
We will leave in a few hours to make the 16 hour trip from Sydney to the centre of Colombo where, after a few hours sleep Annette will commence the 'quarterly' review of each of the SL employees and I will deal with the various aspects of checking on the overall operations of our operations and dealing with the fiduciary and regulatory aspects of the company there. There are now almost eighty people employed in the Colombo office so the personnel review schedule itself is very demanding. I have purposely delayed returning to Colombo after carrying out the always unpleasant task of advising the Sri Lankan General Manager we originally appointed (after a thorough investigation process) that we would not be renewing his annual employment contract for a second time.
Steve has been to Colombo twice in the intervening period to ensure the problems we sought to correct by appointing a new GM were in fact being carried out and to begin to mend the damage done by that incorrect appointment - generally no problems. We have begun to move to the next phase of operations in Colombo (as I have mentioned in these ramblings previously) and my principal objective is to ensure that the building blocks of how to accomplish this result are fully understood. More importantly, I am attempting to understand whether the very ambitious standards we are attempting to put in place can be accomplished using the people we have taken so much trouble to put in place over the past three plus years. Personally, I have no doubt that they have the intellectual and work ethics to accomplish what is going to be attempted but I have no idea whether the overall career satisfaction can be achieved and the career progress satisfaction can be delivered by being so ambitious.
We will be aiming to deliver 100% satisfaction, 100% of the time to residential customers who call for technical, provisioning and account resolution. Given the current customer base's wide disparities in technical abilities, attitudes, language/communication skills and a myriad other characteristics this is an 'impossibly' ambitious project. However we don't see it that way and we have spent over three years 'doing the very large amount of ground work' to make it possible. The process we started more than three years ago has a long way to go, assuming we get through this stage. Our future aim is to build the skills and processes of our current support personnel to 'consultant' level which will require us to work with at least one of our carrier suppliers to improve the diagnostic tools currently in place and achieve the completely different level of 'trust' that is required to make that possible. That's in the future - the next, major, step is to resolve all customer technical issues within the first telephone call or email response.
I am also looking forward to seeing the progress that has been made by Clarissa and Clare (and Diana and Kokila) in developing the processes that will allow the more rapid expansion of our small business and medium business sales teams in Colombo. We have invested quite heavily, both in financial terms and in management time and effort, in building our business customer sales and support functions as well as in very heavily investing in the infrastructures to support business services over the past year. We are in the final stages of reaching an agreement with a much larger 'partner' to accelerate this investment in 2012 and to move to the next stage of becoming a much larger provider of data and VoIP services to business and corporate customers. Before we can finalise that 'partnership' status we need to complete the building of the 60 person, Phase One, sales and support organisation that we need to put in place as the required "proof of concept" that is required before we can expect another 'party' to co-invest with us in Phase Two of this ambitious program.
So, it promises to be an exciting 5 days....pity about the first 20 hours.
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