John Linton
......in either business or personal life.
The first full day in Sri Lanka was quite busy but we got through the required trip agenda items without any difficulties. As usual, jet lag then came with a rush and we were back in our room asleep before 8.30 pm local time. Again, as usual, didn't sleep well on the second night as body and mind try to decide which time zone they are in so we were at breakfast well before seven and back at the office shortly thereafter (the entrance to the office being around 30 meters away from the entrance of the hotel).
We will commence the sales training in about an hour and then return to going through how we will change the SL operation to meet the new requirements of our partnership with AAPT and our changes to directing our ADSL activities toward the Australian small business markets.We have already put in place the 'new' method of handling ADSL support calls from a 60 second response that ends up telling the customer what to do to fix their problems to an 8 minute (after a CSR responds) complete fix to whatever was wrong with their connection (unless a carrier has to be involved in the fix). It was a 'dramatic' change of policy but it was a correct decision and as we resolve the various 'wrinkles' will become a major benefit to all categories of end users. However we will need to do quite a few more things before it delivers exactly what we are aiming for.
Putting in place the processes and plans to make such sweeping changes to any support operation was never going to be easy but it was always going to be essential. As we look to 'sign up' somewhere North of 100,000 new small business users over the next two years the type and depth of support that they will require will be totally different to the support required (if not expected) by a residential ADSL user. The major difference, as we see it, is that the small business user will not 'fiddle' with their hardware settings and there will be no calls about "sudden speed drops" or similar user caused issues. A small business user will also be quite prepared to be guided through on line testing to determine where any fault exists and will not argue with the engineer trying to help them - we don't expect small business users to be 'know it alls' who cannot face up to the fact that the problems they are experiencing are caused by their own fiddling and made harder to diagnose because of their reluctance to admit to the fact that they have made changes to things they didn't understand.
So our current iteration of insisting that our CSRs stay on the line until any reported fault is either fully fixed or is referred to a carrier to correct line or DSLAM faults is the first step in preparing to deal with small business customers who just want any problem with their service fixed in the shortest possible time. Our current benchmark is that 85% of all ADSL 'faults' are fixed within 45 minutes of the fault being reported where carrier intervention is not required. We will establish processes and procedures to reduce that time to 20 minutes over the coming three months and, perhaps, offer an 'instant fix' service at some sort of small monthly charge. It will require a great deal of thought and then a lot more planning to achieve such goals.
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