Tag: telstra

Re-inventing management with social media

Is social media changing how management works? It could be the case at Telstra.

Yesterday I went along to hear Telstra’s Paul Geason speak at the American Chamber of Commerce lunch in Sydney.

Geason, who is Group Managing Director for the company’s Enterprise and Government division, was speaking on some of the findings from Telstra’s Clever Australian program along with some of the technology trends he’s encountered in big business and public organisations.

The bulk of Geason’s presentation I reported in an article for Comms Day, and much of his observations about enterprise technology trends wouldn’t surprise keen observers of the industry or regular readers of this blog.

What did stand out though were his comments on how social media is changing management behaviour at Telstra where over 25,000 registered users of the company’s Yammer platform have direct access to the company’s CEO, David Thodey.

Social media is just going crazy. Within Telstra now we have over 25,000 of our staff registered on Yammer. It has been a phenomenon. It’s playing this really interesting role of breaking down the hierarchy in our organisation.

Which is not just because of the technology but it’s also got something to do with our CEO.

He is on Yammer just about every single day of the week. There is not an issue that hits that site that he won’t pick up and direct to the right place to get it to the right place and have it dealt with.

Our people love it, they would never have imagined they could get that level of access and input and intervention from the CEO.

There’s a certain transparency that has come to our organisation that didn’t exist previously which is really great for the levels of engagement of our people and very challenging for us as leaders in having to deal with that level of visibility that was not there before.

I think it’s really changing how organistations are operating.

Paul Geason’s comments are a good example of changing management structures. Not only does it bring accountability to executives, it also means organisations can respond quickly to changing marketplaces – something covered in the Future of Teamwork presentation back in 2010.

A few years ago, no-one would have thought of Telstra as being an open, collaborative organisation yet today it’s gone quite a way down the path to becoming one.

The key though to this is having senior management buying into the process. Without that leadership many companies might be facing a tough future.

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ABC Nightlife February 2013

For February’s ABC Nightlife segment Tony Delroy and I are looking at software prices, the new breed of smartphones for seniors and the future of the telco industry

Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy on ABC Nightife across Australia to discuss how technology affects your business and life. For February 2013 we’ll be looking at the software rip-off, smartphones for seniors and Telstra’s roadmap for the mobile economy.

The show will be available on all ABC Local stations and streamed online through the Nightlife website.

Some of the topics we’ll discuss include the following;

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

Tune in on your local ABC radio station or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

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Creating a service mindset

How tough is it for a business to change it’s customer service focus?

In the Foreign Correspondent report that inspired yesterday’s post about the start up community angel Investor Raval Navikant said  “you don’t need customer service anymore, you have Twitter.”

While it’s refreshing to hear that Twitter is now rightly seen as a customer service channel rather than a marketing tool, it’s worrying that startup businesses still have such a low opinion of supporting their users.

This is the mindset for the web2.0, social and cloud computing communities – that user support can be done though Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), user forums or an anonymous email address that might get read once in a while. It’s the self-help model of helping your users and it’s the biggest weakness of online services.

A worry for these businesses is that big organisations now beginning to remember the importance of customers. What has traditionally been small business’ advantage is  being eroded.

At an Australian Computer Society Foundation lunch in Sydney yesterday Testra Corporation’s diector of Products and IT Enablement, Jenny Woods described how her company is moving to a more service centric culture.

While this isn’t simple in a company the size of Telstra, a task made harder by the telco industry’s customer hostility, it’s certainly a process that’s underway.

There’s a long way to go for Telstra. Along with that traditional telco antipathy towards their customers, they are big company with plenty of silos and aligning management KPIs so the temptation isn’t simply to gouge customers for short term profit is a big change.

Changing that ‘soak the customer’ mindset is the biggest challenge in making companies like Telstra service centric and that means management at all levels have to buy into the process.

Without that senior and middle management commitment, customer support will just be seen as the poor relation to other divisions and will be outsourced to the lowest cost provider at the first opportunity.

Part of that change to a service mindset is in trusting your staff. Jenny described how Telstra abandoned scripts for their home Internet customers and told the support agents they could use their initiative – as a result customer satisfaction went up, problems were solved faster and the number of modem returns slumped.

“The people who do the work, know how to do the work” says Jenny and it’s good that Telstra’s management is recognising the skills in their workforce.

Much of that anti-service culture we see in large organisations is because management don’t respect the skills, experience and knowledge of their workers. Instead they’re treated as naughty children who can be slapped into line with a stern memo.

Today’s economy doesn’t favour businesses and managements who think like that, the organisations that will do well this Century those who are flexible, value their staffs’ skills and have managers who see their role as more than micro-managing their silos.

It also means delivering a product you’re proud to support. If you won’t support your products, then your customers will go to a competitor who looks after their clients.

We fell into a trap into thinking customer service didn’t matter during the late Twentieth Century, it was always a myth and now we have to deliver.

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Locking in the mobile market

Where are the next challenges for a phone industry that’s re-invented itself?

Mobile phone carrier Vodafone yesterday announced its purchase of Cable and Wireless, the company that rolled out the telegraph and phone networks that connected Britain’s empire.

Vodafone’s purchase is one of the final phases of the telco industry’s long term restructure where customers – both home and business users – have switched from land lines to mobile devices.

It’s long been acknowledged the profit in this market lies in devices and data usage which is why Cable and Wireless steadily declined over the past quarter century.

While there’s good money to be made in running undersea cables, which is what C & W did, the big profit is in delivering the data over the “last mile” to the customer.

For most customers, that last mile is the radius around a cellphone base station.

In Australia, this is best illustrated by Telstra’s undisguised glee at being able to offload their legacy copper network and backbone services to the government owned National Broadband Network allowing the former land line monopoly to focus on the mobile, data customer.

That data aspect is important too, one of the big changes in telecommunications over the last 25 years has been the rise of data.

A quarter century ago, voice communications were the main traffic of these networks. For companies like Cable and Wireless, data was a profitable sideline with services like Telex and ISDN being lucrative business niches.

Those rivers of gold distracted incumbent telcos in the early years of the public Internet as they tried to protect those expensive data plans and discouraged customers from using the net.

Over time, a new breed of Internet Service Providers rose who could supply those data services customers wanted.

Ironically, the same thing has happened with mobile phone manufacturers and the rise of the smartphone. Unlike the incumbent telcos, they haven’t adapted.

The incumbents phone manufacturers like Nokia and Motorola missed the rise of data communications and the mobile web as the iPhone and Android devices delivered the portable utility that “dumb phones” couldn’t deliver.

For Nokia, that miss appears fatal with the company rapidly running out of cash as their smartphone devices fail in the marketplace and margins collapse in the sectors they still dominate.

Research In Motion – the manufacturers of the Blackberry phone – are in the same trap. While their devices were data orientated they were more akin to corporate “feature phones” where they did one or two things well but couldn’t deliver the full features mobile phone users increasingly wanted.

The rise of the iPhone threatened Blackberry’s market and the arrival of the iPad with applications like Evernote killed most of the product’s demand.

Blackberry and Nokia’s decline while companies like Telstra and Vodafone survive – not to mention massive profits of companies like Mexico’s Telefonica – illustrate the value of government licenses to telcos and the breathing space it gives the management of these licensees.

We shouldn’t underestimate though the risks to all these businesses if they don’t adapt.

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Milking the dead cow

How Sensis killed itself and the lessons for Australian business

Many big Australian businesses seem untouchable as they dominate their markets to degree almost unknown in most other developed countries. As the story of Sensis shows, Australia’s big duopolies may not be as strong as they appear.

The last few months have been tough for Sensis; revenues last year fell nearly 25%, the once strong business was folded into the latest incarnation of Telstra Digital Media and now the CEO Bruce Akhurst has departed after seven years.

What could have been a dynamic business is now shriveling away, what went wrong?

Milking the revenue cow

Bruce did a good job of keeping revenue coming in during a period that the then owners, the Federal government, wanted to maximise the book value of Telstra before its sale.

Year upon year Sensis could be relied upon to squeeze more money out of the businesses advertising in it.

Management were focused on extracting revenue from the existing client base rather than responding to the obvious threat from online search.

Expensive distractions

When senior management decided to respond to the online world, they were sucked into unnecessary and expensive distractions; the most notable being the 2005 launch of Sensis Search where the then Telstra CEO – the disastrous Sol Trujillo – famously sneered “Google Schmoogle”.

Three years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, Sensis admitted defeat. By then the small business advertisers who were the life blood of the directory market had woken up to the reality their customers weren’t using the Yellow Pages anymore. Sensis had missed the boat.

Clunky processes

Whenever I spoke to small businesses about Sensis through the 2000s there was the same complaint, “I don’t have time to deal with their sales people, just let me tick a box on a web page or send a fax!”

Purchasing space was difficult for customers, their 1950s Willy Loman sales model should have been automated in the 1990s and never was.

Instead Sensis was locked into a high cost sales model and added friction for advertisers which they shouldn’t need, not only were they expensive but they actually made it difficult for their customers to place orders.

Should Sensis have been sold?

At its peak in 2005, Sensis was valued at between 8 and 10 billion dollars as a stand alone company.

Many, including myself, believe that breaking Sensis away would have been the best result given Telstra were at the time focused on protecting their fixed line copper wire monopoly and the directories business was not getting the management attention or capital investment it needed.

History shows though that we might be wrong.

Commander Communications was spun off from Telstra in 2000 and like Sensis had inherited an almost monopoly position in the small business communications market.

By 2007 Commander was out of business thanks to a combination of incompetence, management greed and an inability to recognise the changing communications marketplace.

The Australian disease

Commander’s biggest problem was it saw its customers as cash cows, just as Sensis did. This exposes a much deeper problem in Australian industry and management culture.

Over the last thirty years Australian government policies have seen duopolies develop in almost every key sector of the economy.

All of these duopolies share the same “customer as a milk cow” philosophy which, along with the rampaging Australian dollar, has dragged Australia into being a high cost economy.

The banking industry, while not a duopoly for the moment, is an even more debilitating example of the cash cow syndrome where small business has been crippled by excessive interest rates and fees – particularly since the 2008 crisis.

Sensis’ demise is systemic of a culture that fixates on extracting maximum revenue from customers; concepts like innovation, R&D or adapting to market trends don’t have a role in this mentality.

Milking cows is a fine business, but sometimes you have to think about the health of the herd.

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Comparing local review and search sites

How do the local search services compare?

With the Australian launch of local search and recommendation site Yelp, it’s worthwhile comparing the different sites to see how well they worked.

The sites work in different ways, some – like Sensis Yellow Pages and True Local – are online directories that search just the title and description of business.

Yelp, Foursquare and Word Of Mouth Online, are socially based and derive their searches on the content and number of community reviews. Their algorithms, the formulas to figure out what customers are looking for, are more complex than the basic online directories.

Most complex of all are the hybrid searches, notably Google Places and Facebook Places, that build local upon their search and social media data.

Each model has it’s own strengths and weaknesses which shows when we do a search. Due to time restrictions we only did two.

Looking for brunch in Neutral Bay, NSW

The first search was using what somebody might be expected to search for on a casual weekend or holiday morning. Neutral Bay and surrounding suburbs have plenty of cafes catering to the brunch crowd so it should be expected to return plenty of hits.

Yelp

search results for neutral bay brunch on yelp

The new contender only found one local result and the rest being on the other side of the Harbour Bridge, including one at Bondi Beach which may as well be in the Upper Amazon to the average Sydney North Shore dweller.

Interestingly, entering neighbouring suburbs changes the first two or three results to that suburb but the subsequent listings are the same remote locations as for the Neutral Bay query. This might indicate popularity with the current Yelp users or may be part of the package merchants get when they pay for a listing.

True Local

a search on true local for brunch in neutral bay

News Limited’s True Local disappointed one cafe in the district was identified and the number one result was in the city.

This poor results are probably due to the word “brunch” not appearing in the local cafes’ descriptions or titles, but this is a serious weakness for True Local, particularly in a district where they dominate the local news media.

Google Places

brunch local search results for google places

Surprisingly, Google Places returned an extremely poor result with no local businesses found.

Again, this is probably due to the failure of business owners to ensure keywords are entered in their business description and it illustrates how Google is allowing an opportunity to pass them by.

Facebook Places

Facebook Places results from Neutral Bay brunch searchNothing. Nyet. Zip. No brunch for you.

Yahoo!7

yahoo local search results

Another poor result that has just scraped information off the web. It shows the weakness of the Yahoo! and Channel Seven joint venture which, like News Limited, is letting opportunities pass.

Bing/NineMSN

Local search results on NineMSN for Neutral Bay Lunch

Probably the most disgraceful of the results, NineMSN returned two cafes for the whole of Sydney, a city of four million people.

The second result entailed, according to Bing’s directions, a 38km drive timed at an optimistic 23 minutes involving $9 in tolls and an illegal u-turn.

NineMSN’s performance shows just how irrelevant Microsoft has become in the online space and their Australian joint venture partner is more interested in selling big integrated campaigns to advertising agencies.

Given NineMSN and Bing are the default browser and search engine on nearly two million computers sold in Australia each year, not having a local business strategy is squandering a massive opportunity.

Citysearch/Sensis

brunch local search on Citysearch for Neutral Bay

Founded by Fairfax, Citysearch could have been a great success combining the assets and readership of Fairfax’s metropolitan and local newspapers coupled with their experienced sales teams selling advertising space and subscriptions. Good management could have done this.

Sadly Fairfax was being run by Professor Fred Hilmer and his army of power suited McKinsey consultants and Citysearch was eventually sold for a pittance to Sensis, who have allowed it to shrivel away as the zero result for our search shows.

Eatability

local search on eatability for neutral bay brunch

Eatability was a genuine surprise, returning no brunch establishments in the area. The only thought is that no cafe in the neighbourhood has the word “brunch” in their keywords. Still a very poor result.

Urbanspoon

local search for brunch at neutral bay on urbanspoon

The web version of Urbanspoon returned the most bizarre result, correctly finding one local cafe but misinterpreting the address as being in Bankstown on the other side of Sydney.

Urbanspoon’s iPhone app returned a far better range of results in surrounding suburbs although it only found one cafe actually in Neutral Bay which wasn’t the one incorrectly found on their web app, which didn’t appear at all.

Word of Mouth Online

word of mouth online local search for brunch in neutral bay

Word Of Mouth Online delivered the best result of the web pages with two of the first three results being relevant. Of the other seven, they met the criteria of being within a 5km radius of the location which in Sydney can be a 12km drive.

The results would have been better with more local establishments but it appears the keyword “brunch” hasn’t been used by many of the WOMO reviewers.

Note: After the review I was contacted by the founder of WOMO, Fiona Adler, it appears some of the reviews have have been updated in the meantime. I’ve changed the results below, but the left the one above as it was correct at the time of the review.

Foursquare

neutral bay local brunch search on four square

Like Yelp, Foursquare relies heavily on users’ contributions and this shows in the flaky, almost useless results for our search terms on a web based search.

Foursquare’s iPhone app was far more efficient, identifying a range of good venues in the area which were ranked according to friends’ recommendations.

Sensis/Yellow Pages

search for brunch on yellow pages for local brunch in neutral bay

Again, “no brunch for you.” It’s almost scandalous that Yellow Pages has no entries at all for “brunch” for an inner Sydney suburb.

Redoing the search

Clearly the term “brunch” is problematic in all the services, so as a check here’s the relevant first page results for other search terms on each of the services;

Service Café Neutral Bay Breakfast Neutral Bay Lunch Neutral Bay
Yelp 7/10 2/10 7/10
True Local 9/30 0/30 0/30
Google Place 10/10 0/10 10/10
Yahoo!7 not relevant
Bing/MSN 3/10 0/10 0/10
Citysearch 6/10 3/6 4/4
Eatability 40/50 8/8 23/31
Urban spoon 3/3 0/0 0/0
foursquare 3/20 1/20 1/20
WOMO 8/10 2/10 5/10
Sensis 7/10 0/10 0/10

As we found with the earlier search, Yelp was somewhat inconsistent and no doubt the social aspects will see it improve as more users come on board, the results are highly dependent on the terms used by reviewers and this will affect the search results.

True Local’s score was surprisingly bad, the search for “cafe” found 12 places but three are long closed. “Breakfast” listed B&B accomodation and “lunch” found outlets in the city and Eastern Suburbs.

Google Places also disappointed on “breakfast”, picking up some B&B establishments along with some city cafes. This is almost certainly due to keywords missing in descriptions.

Yahoo!7 doesn’t get a rating as all it does is scrape other sites and often refers you to other search services. They are just going through the motions.

Microsoft and NineMSN’s service again failed dismally; the “cafe” result was poor, “breakfast” looked for B&Bs and “lunch” amazingly didn’t find a thing in Neutral Bay.

Citysearch’s results for “cafe” found nine places, three of which are long closed which indicates the lack of maintenance their database receives. Encouragingly, Citysearch was one of the best performers for lunch and dinner, albeit only on four and six places found.

Eatability had by far the most impressive number of results, however a large proportion of the places have closed and are not flagged as such. This probably indicates a lack of maintenance by the owners.

WOMO was good and like Yelp their results are highly dependent on the words used by reviewers, so key words could be missed simply because reviewers didn’t use them.

Sensis performed well on “cafes” except that three of the ten listed were closed. The lack of results on “breakfast” and “lunch” is due to no places having those words in their name.

Conclusions

This comparison is not scientific, being based on a narrow search and small sample size, but there’s a few things we can take away from the experiment.

Search is still young

Right now, search is still a crude tool.

From the results, we can see that the keywords used by reviewers and businesses matter. If the public are looking for “brunch” and that isn’t on your cafe’s website and online listings, then you won’t appear.

Over time that will change as the web and search engines get smarter but right now search is still at a basic stage in its development.

You have to be there

Customers are using these tools to find what they need and if a business isn’t listed, then they can’t be found. Setting up a profile and getting some favourable reviews is important.

The business who are being pro-active are the ones who are succeeding.

There’s a lot of opportunity

It’s no surprise that older organisations like Fairfax, Sensis and Microsoft are failing to understand local search. What is suprising is how poorly the newer players like Google and Facebook are doing.

This opens up a lot of opportunity for services like Yelp and Foursquare in adding value to the data already available through services like Google, Facebook and Sensis.

Yelp’s tie up with Sensis makes a lot of sense from the US company’s point of view; they get to ride on Sensis’ sales team, maybe some licensing fees and – most importantly – they can access the richest, albeit not always accurate, database of Australian businesses.

For small, local business there’s a lot of opportunity as well. By getting online and registered on these services, it’s possible to become more visible and improve your competitive position.

The market’s young and there’s a lot of potential for disruptive players. It will be interesting to see how incumbents deal with the threat.

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Big, hairy broadband goals

fibre_opticThis column first appeared in SmartCompany. Since writing it, I’ve also done an ABC spot on the National Broadband rollout.

The more I research and reflect on the proposal, the more I’m convinced this plan is a winner – assuming it goes ahead.

I’m also more convinced than ever that Telstra is the big winner from the proposal as it relieves them of the Universal Service Obiligation and means they can avoid the massive costs of maintaining and upgrading the copper network. Not to mention the likelihood that the government will end up leasing space on Telstra’s existing fibre network.

Jim Collins in his book “Good to Great” coined the phrase BHAG, or Big Hairy Audacious Goal. Few goals are bigger or more audacious than spending $43 billion to run fibre to every house, office, school, farm and factory in Australia.

My first reaction to the national broadband plan was disappointment – on Twitter I commented “there goes the Rudd Government’s final strand of tech credibility.”

Having had time to think about the plan, it’s clear I was wrong. The announcement is a huge change in policy and it will have immense ramifications on how we do business.

Fibre-to-the-premises completes the gaps in our communications systems. When the rollout is complete, we can rely on our internet links and assume our customers and employees have the same dependable connections.

For regional enterprises this is great news, as it will bring the world to the door to some of Australia’s best industries and businesses. It levels the playing field between big and small businesses, regardless of their location.

For Telstra, the result is mixed. While it means more competition in regional areas, it also means it can save billions on upgrading the aging copper network. The criticism of the rollout’s cost ignores the massive replacement cost already required to replace the old phone lines.

While perhaps not good news for management, the proposed break up of Telstra is good for shareholders. Sensis and BigPond, for example, would be worth far more when not shackled to a company fixated on maximising revenue from a ramshackle copper network.

Another great change is in Canberra’s communications policy. Australia has suffered from communications and media being tied together, with the interests of well connected commercial groups being more important than good planning.

The Keating government’s disastrous cable TV rollout was an attempt to provide modern infrastructure while appeasing the dominant media tycoons who saw technology as a threat to their empires.

As a result we got a mess and the cable TV networks, which could have provided this infrastructure 15 years ago became a political and financial quagmire, which delivered little of what was promised.

We shouldn’t understate the social benefits of the plan either. As the recession bites, the need for skilled and unskilled labour to build the rollout will assist in keeping unemployment down.

It’s certainly billions of dollars better spent than propping up shopping centre developers, banks or the manufacturers of cars that no-one wants.

The biggest change though is ideology. Until now, it’s been difficult to imagine a government proposing a massive infrastructure project without the ticket clippers of the merchant banks and other cronies skimming a fat share.

In every respect, this is the best communications plan and one of the most visionary ideas we’ve seen out of Canberra in generations. While it’s going to cost, history will show it’s money well spent.

Whether the broadband rollout becomes reality or not, fast, reliable communications are already a business necessity and will become even more so.

Think about what fast broadband means for your business and plan how you can take advantage of it. Those who don’t grasp the opportunities are going to be left behind.

So have a think about it. You might come up with some BHAGs of your own.

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