Sunday, January 31. 2010If You Live Long Enough......John Linton ...you will eventually hear everything. I have been lucky enough to have enjoyed almost perfect health in terms of never, with perhaps two exceptions, having had cause to visit a doctor in the whole of my life other than to get some sort of mandatory inoculations or vaccinations. However I did have a bout of nausea yesterday evening of a violent and unpleasant kind that I put down to reading an email that pointed something out to me that I found too incredible for, apparently, my mind/body to react to in any other way....or maybe it was the fourth piece of pizza which was particularly greasy? The statement, and I am quoting exactly, was: "Exetel charges so little for ADSL and makes no money out of providing the service that it doesn't care whether its good customers either stay or go because there is no financial benefit to Exetel in either case so I'm going to move to an ISP like Internode or Adam where they really value their customers because they make a lot of money out of them". There was no elaboration as to what might have changed in his particular circumstances to generate this statement and when I checked his service history he had never raised a ticket with Exetel over the time we had been providing any service to him and looking at his usage records there were no aberrations in downloads over the previous 12 months which might indicate some sort of issue. I have a great deal of trouble in actually understanding why a customer who apparently has had a trouble free service for his time of usage would then suggest that the lack of profit Exetel makes in providing ADSL services means that he should go to another provider who charges much more.(Exetel chooses to make less than $A1.00 per month 'profit' from providing its ADSL services but that is our choice and has nothing to do with the quality of the service) If there were more hours in the day I would have replied to his email seeking clarification but there aren't so I simply replied thanking him for his use of our services and wishing him more success with his next provider. I had never considered, up to that moment, that trying to reduce the end user price of providing any service to the lowest possible level was anything but something that was entirely in the very best interests of any customer. It seems impossible to me that people who operate a business on such a basis can be considered to "not care" about the best interests of the customer - surely, de facto, not charging more than covering costs with a minute amount for profit is acting in a deeply caring way about customers? Apparently charging the lowest amount possible can now be seen as an act of uncaring about customers? (As an aside - I wonder what this about to be ex-customer thinks about Exetel providing services to its Pioneer Customers at a loss for as long as they stay customers? Is that, by his definition, an act of even greater uncaring?). So, having slept on it, I came to the conclusion that he must mean that by charging so little Exetel have to skimp on providing some elements of the service that are essential to the correct functioning of the service....I could be quite wrong but that is as close to making sense of someone complaining about a price being too low that I can reach at the moment. Except that I can't, after being closely associated with the operation of ISPs for the past 15 or so years, see ANY element, that Exetel doesn't provide, and provide at least as well as any ISP in Australia - and provides many that are better. Having said that, which is obviously based on my personal understanding of what is required to deliver a complete ADSL service, I still can't, in any way, understand how trying to reduce the cost of a service to the lowest possible level can then be judged to be "uncaring". Is it a requirement of satisfactory service to make a large profit? Does that mean if your company has no interest in making a substantial profit that you shouldn't be in business? As I have never, in the whole of my commercial life, seen such a view expressed before I think I must have misunderstood what was really meant. Perhaps all that was meant was that by charging so little it wasn't possible to include some element that was really required and that element was far more important than a lower cost of the overall service. Perhaps we need to poll our current customers to get their suggestions as to what Exetel need to do to add to the current service elements and what should be charged to provide them? Personally I blame decades of poor English language education for producing an increasing number of Australians who can't clearly express themselves in written communications. (My own inability to communicate clearly in written form is entirely due to my own laziness).
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John, this soon to be ex-customer has just expressed the normal desire for the human trait of mutual affilliation. They obviously have little in their life (family, religion, social interaction etc) that they channel their desires into things/services they purchase - in this case internet access in the search to seek fulfilment.
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This is pure conjecture on my part...... John looked into the customer's history and could find no reason for unhappiness.
It is possible that a relative or friend had an unfavourable experience that has caused this customer to think they way he does. Or maybe he read some of the trash on WP and he got sucked into believing what he read. Some people can be very gullible..... Comment (1)
Lawrie,
That could well be the case. It is so strange that I think we will, formally, look at what current customers would like to see improved or added. It wasn't a waste of time receiving such a strange view. Comments (5)
I am inclined to agree with both of the above posters, with trolls representing themselves as yourself in the comments below this article http://delimiter.com.au/2010/01/26/why-john-lintons-not-that-crazy/ , and some of the baseless allegations and untruths put about on WP, some truly naive readers could end up believing some of the garbage put about by these idiot stick figures.
Comment (1)
I had one customer last week call me saying they wanted to get off Exetel because it dropped out too often and they got too much SPAM.
I said "Sure. I'll buy the modem back from you at the price you paid for it" happy to let them go since they seemed adamant that Exetel was the problem. (Which of course I knew it wasn't.) Two days later I had another call saying they had bought a new computer and wanted a hand to set it up. I asked what ISP they had gone with, and they had decided to stick with Exetel. When on site I gently quizzed a little more to find out what the problems were. The problem was that they were getting SPAM in their gmail box and thought it was Optus' fault at first; and they were having trouble with the Internet dropping out. I explained that the ISP is not the source of the SPAM - more likely one of their thousands of contacts had a virus. The Internet dropout problems were most likely due to their E160 HSPA modem running on a first generation Asus EEEPC (the really small underpowered one) which they were running their favourite Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 amongst several other full-size apps, and IE of course. Their new quad core 4gig laptop is at the opposite extreme and no more problems Why am I telling you this? I guess just to remind you that in these days of instant yet permanent communications, it's easy to say something without having given it any thought first; an d also... I can actually vaguely understand this person's notion. Using this HSPA customer as an example I earn 45 cents a month from the above customer as commission for their PAYG HSPA service. If they want out, it's (financially) no skin of my nose, so there's no financial incentive for me to try to retain him as a customer. However, this completely ignores my (and probably your) greater desire to have a happy customer of course; so it's not the philosophy I run with by default So, if you were to view your customers simply as sources of income, perhaps it would make sense that you'd have a greater desire to look after those who earnt you the most money. In reality, I believe your customers and your pride in your service mean more to you than the money - one of the things that makes Exetel special. Comment (1)
Thank you for that.
Of course, you're quite correct in everything you say. It just makes the email I cited even more difficult to understand. Comments (5)
Why not offer to make him a "Gold" customer at $10 extra a month? Give him a special badge/jpg when he logs into member services and promise all the same services to him that you do now
Comments (2)
Ahh..for the good old days.
When we set up Exetel we assumed we would be dealing with responsible adults who wanted the lowest cost for the most service that could be delivered. That proved impossible. Oh well.....life never turns out the way you reasonably expect. Comments (5)
Oh well... seems some people just want a special "badge" that makes them appear more valued. Mabe he just needs a big hug?
Just donate the $10 extra to the SriLankan elephants or something similar. T. Comments (2)
This isn't such a silly idea. Ever noticed how airlines sell exactly the seats on the same plane going to the same location at the same time for vastly different prices.
Marketing theory (Sorry for mentioning both the m and t words John) suggests that where there is no easily apparent way of comparing the quality of competing products, buyers will often fall back on price as a substitute measure - the higher the price the better the quality. There was a study recently where people were asked to taste a range of arbitrarily priced but unlabelled wines - the more expensive priced wines were nearly always preferred even when it was low quality plonk. Personally I wouldn't bother with a customer survey - the results will always be cloudy as there is no such thing as a typical customer. If you have picked your niche and are still happy with it, concentrate on mining that for all it is worth. Comment (1)
One of the benefits with no/few choices of upstream suppliers is that you don't have any room to move in setting your own prices.
Comments (5)
First obvious; swallow less grease if you've that prone after absorbing half a pizza.
Second, the customer poll may not be a bad idea to read subscribers 'temperature' on a number of issues and thereby your 'base becomes (better) understood. - Of course, that is provided a willingness to openly share the data generated by any poll (any conclusions on analysis would also be interesting but is ultimately yours to own) Also, consider how your version of a Exetel'Happiness Score' might be of value based on customer's concerns. Measurables may include those parameters which define Exetel internally and some broad factors which shape it external such as copyright (law); WiMAX (competitors); net filters and NBN (political) etc. How many customers reading this blog weekly could contribute to that? page 15* http://iin.irmau.com/irm/Content/PDF/2009Annualreport.pdf incorporate a Net Promotor Score (NPS) in part to arm against customer churn... though while he similarly may have started from a garage days humbly, I guess 970,891 dollars (FY09) can now buy a lot of pizzas... "because you're worth it" Comment (1)
If, as a primary 'ideas generator' of a business, no matter how small, you ever resort to copying what some other company has done then you can be sure of one thing - you are well past your use by date.
If Exetel ever copied something a company like iinet did I would cut my throat. Comments (5)
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