John Linton Exetel 'created' an agent program in July 2004 and we still have many of those first agents actively promoting Exetel services around Australia. Over the first year or so of building up the agent program it became, and remains, an important part of Exetel's existence and in the current very difficult times it has become even more important. As the problems of Telstra's ongoing 'win back' programs together with TPG's saturation advertising have made life very difficult for Exetel and therefore our agents (resulting in the recent price increases for ADSL services and our need to reduce agent commissions) our agents have been faced with increased difficulties.
Part of the 2012 planning was based around what we could do for our agents and VISPs (wholesale customers) to at least partially address the ongoing loss of customers to Telstra Residential's increasingly shrill campaigns and their increasingly magnaminous financial inducements. We couldn't come up with very much for all of the planning period but a chance remark by a prospective agent on a completely different topic started us along a more productive chain of thought. By COB tomorrow we will have put in place a new set of 'agent only' plans that should provide our agents with unbeatable ADSL1 and ADSL2 offerings for lower end users (10 gb peak, a 12 hour off peak period of 180 gb plus $10.00 discounts from those low prices for each mobile plan ordered). These plans will be 'unbeatable' compared to any competitive offering.
We could never achieve the pricing of these plans but our ViSPs and agents remove the selling and support costs from our pricing 'models' and allow us to make $2.00 profit per plan per month with the agent able to beat any competitor's pricing. Whether the agent want's to add a few dollars extra and create his/her own plans is entirely up to them - our VISPs will certainly do that. If our agents want to to that we will, by the end of March, offer them a plan rating and billing service that will allow them to set their own prices and have the billing of their customers done by Exetel on their own invoice company headings so that they can maximise their financial returns based on their own decisions of how they price the services.
We will also provide longer telephone support hours for agents by providing extended hours agent support from Sri Lanka over the coming months. this will be part of the program to add 'white label' product and financial services, such as billing and accounts collection processes as well as agent customer support processes (at a low charge) for the larger VISPs.There is a very long way to go to complete the processes that will bring these new ideas/concepts to full implementation but it seems a very sound premise that will increase the ability to provide residential services to low and medium residential down loaders.....the majority of the overall market places in both city and country locations. There may well be a whole lot of difficulties that we have not considered/are not aware of but the initial reactions and suggestions from the agents who have responded to this offer have been very positive. It will be interesting to see how it works out over the next week or so.
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