Road Show Review

Road Show Review 13/09/05

Today at 11am I went with a crowd of strangers or “colleagues” to the road show. I was sitting in there and thought- ‘hmm wonder if when I get back Andrews going to ask me to write about this' so I listened. And it was the only seminar I believe I’ve ever listened too, and it was very interesting.

Allan talked about the issues I have wanted to be discussed for 4 months- market competition, quality of products and services, profit, company goals and visions, our network, and most relevant and important, customer services among a few other things, like how at the start of this year no-one knew what on earth was on our servers.

He dropped the news that we are no more aiming to be the top ‘ICE’ company- actually no more ‘ICE’ at all, he said- his words were we can tear the rocket down and cut it in half.

He talked on about how we will be ‘sweeping’ our network, that were eliminating applications like MEGA and that we have far to many platforms and will be eliminating some, and generally re-doing nearly everything.

There was his colleague who did a blurb on the financial state of the company- I noted during this segment the walls are a startling blue and the chairs are red. Then Allan started talking again.

He spends a 3rd of everyday dealing with customer complaints- getting through the why what how and when of every one. He’s had everything from people saying they’ll go back to telecom, saying they’ll sue us, and/or will take us to fair go. All of which we’ve heard first hand.

He also told us about a meeting that’s held once a week, which reviews the company’s customer service actions over that week. Like how we responded to things like connecting up new customers, outages, complaints, and in what timeframe. And who was effected and where by these outages and so on.

Then it was question time where people got to ask him questions like why do we hire in contractors for twice the rate our permanent staff are paid, and why our connect-to-billing turnaround time is 8 days compared to Telecom’s 2.

The main emphasis of this road show was Allan highlighting to us all the areas we are not doing so well in- and how to change this for the better. He has a lot of good ideas and processes in place or in planning to go and achieve this. The most important to him and us was the customer services issue- and about how our customer services is, to put it nicely, really not our strong point.