Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman

Think you're doing a good job? So did Larry Kestelman, head of internet service provider Dodo – until the day the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman came knocking on his door.

The ombudsman

That visit from the ombudsman was "the absolute darkest moment in our company's history," Kestelman candidly recalls now. "They hadn't come to see if I needed any help, or to find out what was going on; they had rocked up to find out if I was going to be able to pay my bill."

"The first four years were a lot of fun and it seemed like a breeze – but at the time we got served an education by our clients speaking with their feet, and our not being able to handle their phone calls through our call centre. They were very, very dark days."

The company redirected money from marketing to rebuild its core systems, abandoning a straining Samsung PABX and ploughing more than $5 million into Cisco Systems contact centre and networking solutions capable of handling large call volumes over higher-bandwith DS3 communications links. It employed 25 developers to build its systems, and set up a 2200-strong contact centre in Manila, which operates pursuant to this agreement the Acquire brand and services clients from Dodo and a dozen other companies.

"I had to relearn and reinvent the business from scratch," Kestelman says, "and sit down and truthfully look at myself as a businessperson, and at the industry and the people I had around me. The biggest realisation is that it's not about the innovation or the marketing; it's all about customer service."

Research firm Gartner recently identified "contextual and social user experience" as a top IT priority in 2012. An AMDOCS forecast pushed service providers to "reinvent the customer experience in 2012" during seeking to replicate what it calls the 'Apple effect' – building products and services that are seamlessly integrated, and so then supported with proactive customer care and loyalty schemes.

Making this happen requires anticipating user needs and proactively aggregating data from a broad range of systems that must be then-integrated – creating an imperative for information executives who must both find new ways to deliver current services, and steer the business into new areas.

Kestelman believes the coming National Broadband Network will commoditise internet access and kill the idea of the ISP as a standalone entity. Dodo now resells electricity and mobile services, and will start selling gas within the at once year.

Competitors are listening: iiNet recently launched mobile services and has targeted IPTV services at rivals Internode, Foxtel, Telstra and AUSTAR.

Done right, such value-add translates to new earnings as clients respond to perceived value: analyst firm Point Topic recently recommended value-added telco services boosted earnings by 37 percent over basic rates.

With business diversity and proactive, personalised marketing the order of the day, companies that fail to invest in the systems to deliver these outcomes will struggle to keep up.

10 Jul Dodo's broadband network performance and customer service woes have plumbed new lows, with the ISP's clients reporting cripplingly slow browsing speeds for the past two weeks.