John Linton I looked at our support statistics over the weekend - something I haven't done for the whole of 2011 so far - as Steve is going to Sri Lanka this week to do the quarterly personnel reviews there instead of Annette who has been doing them since we set up the office in Colombo some three years ago. Over the time we have been operating in Colombo we have continually increased the times that telephone support is available and Steve will determine on this review whether we need to extend the support hours to 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We currently provide telephone support every day of the year for 14 hours a day and have never been convinced that it is worthwhile, or practical, to extend those hours. In terms of call answer times and call resolution time these statistics have trended positively for over two years - something you would expect as the number of support personnel's average time with Exetel continue to grow longer. This is now reaching optimal lengths of service which, as anyone who has ben in the support business knows presents a new set of problems - particularly for professional engineers which all of Exetel's support staff are.
My reason for looking at the statistics was to determine how far we had come in the getting on for eight years of Exetel's existence in terms of improving the technical support we provide to residential customers. The information and statistics we have kept over that time is quite interesting and most of the 'base' statistics are 'published' on the Exetel forum on the first day of each month in terms of number of calls answered, dropped and response and talk times.....something no other provider dares to publish.....for obvious reasons. We also publish on the main web site contact page the wait times in the various contact queues - again something that is rare for a communications provider to do....again for the obvious reasons..... (the only other company I know that does it demonstrates how unacceptably long their wait times are). One key aspect of the 'academic' exercise of developing a five year plan has to be based on providing better telephone support than any competitor. Such an 'ambition' is actually quite hard to define because it partially depends on events and people beyond any supplier's control.
I don't know what Steve will find in his reviews this week but one of the issues will be, apart from whether we increase support hours to 24 x 7 x 366, will be determining what the 'life' of a residential telephone support engineer is in practical terms. Longevity in telephone support in this industry is an interesting issue. I don't think we have reached a definitive view on this issue and it's something we need to determine over the coming years....irrespective of how Exetel's business may or may not change. One of the reasons that the current NBNCo is so unsuitable as a residential service provider is its complete lack of line diagnostic tools - undoubtedly these will become available at some future time because they are essential in providing end user 'support' and sorting the ignorance, and just plain lies, from actuality. Optus has always had the best tools and its only lately, after ten years, that Telstra has begun to make line diagnosis available (at least to Exetel) - so the time frame for NBNCo is not a given at this stage. Based on the complete ineptitude shown by all NBNCo personnel in getting the first 50 trial customers connected (zero have yet been able to connect yet) it seems not only do ISPs not have the tools for line testing but neither do the NBNCo field and back office personnel....yes, yes; I know it's early days, but the current situation with the 'NBN2' would be comedic if it weren't so pathetic.
However, in my opinion, the main question is just how far beyond the NTU do you have to provide support to provide a 'good' support service? Or, perhaps, how do you avoid getting customers who assert things like "your international site link is down" or "my speed suddenly dropped to unusable and I haven't changed anything" or. .....all the other stupidities of ignorant users? If that issue can't be 'solved' then no service will be regarded as good - let alone better than any provider's user base. The issue is that there is no quality control a provider can exercise over the majority source of problems with its service - the stupidity of a small percentage of its end users. Solving that problem remains in an unknown future but clearly it needs a completely different approach to the ones taken so far. I have a 'glimmering' of how that could possibly be done but it needs a lot more thought. Assuming that there is no sensible process to prevent ignorant users signing up for the service in the first place, then dealing with ignorant users needs to be more effectively put in place than it is today without requiring the 'good users' from having to pay for the ignorance and attitudes of 'bad users'.
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