Telkom Business wants market leadership

Despite having a footprint of 400 000 business customers in South Africa, Telkom Business is trying to defend it’s position at the top of the telecommunications market in the country. Coming off the back of a two week roadshow throughout South Africa, Telkom hosted a press conference to try and separate the company’s consumer reputation from it’s enterprise one.

Leading the presentation was Dr. Brian Armstrong who joined Telkom Enterprise a year ago as the Senior Managing Executive for Enterprise Markets. Armstrong spent some time describing Telkom’s current market position and detailing how the company was going to change it’s position from being the incumbent telecoms operator to being the market leader. It News Africa spoke to Dr. Armstrong after the presentation to get a clearer understanding of how Telkom Business plans to restore it’s reputation in the marketplace.

“Any incumbent operator is seen as a part of history, the historical tag and the association with them goes back to the days when they were a monopoly and therefore they did not have a business mind-set. That gave rise to some bad habits in the old days. Perceptions persist for a long time and there is a big issue about changing perceptions.” Dr. Armstrong said.

“There is also a big issue about changing the culture within the organisation. Anyone who has worked in a large organisation, let alone a large incumbent, recognises that one of the biggest changes one has to make is the change in mind-set; in the business we have customers, we don’t have subscribers.”

Telkom Business is concentrating it’s efforts to address the negative reputation.

“We used to have a very fragmented product development value chain in the company, we’ve put it all together in one place,” Dr. Armstrong explains. “We have created a product house which has developed product road maps to say what products we need to deliver to the market, and how those products compare to competitors products. We have developed a strategic product mind-set as opposed to a reactive mind-set.”

Telkom Business has set itself the goal of achieving “flawless customer service”. Dr. Armstrong describes Telkom Business’ efforts in this respect; “A lot of operators consolidate all their call centers to drive efficiency. But what we have found is that led to a deterioration in service for our business customers. We have separated that out and we now have a dedicated contact centre for our small business customers. We instituted dedicated service management teams to manage the delivery of our complex services to our big customers.”

Referring to part of the presentation which showed graphs of customer satisfaction showing a generally positive trend over the past four years, Dr. Armstrong said; “Perception always affects us but it is interesting that the closer you work with us the more positive your perception becomes. If you look at our biggest customers, we are a critical supplier of theirs, if we mess up their business suffers badly. So our Big Corporate and Business customers work very closely with us and their perception of us is very different to the general market perception.”

“We have seen an increase in our customer service reaction trends. We have created the “Small and Medium Business Service Management” center which is a focal point for escalating small business customer issues without holding the rest of the organisation accountable for small business customers.” He said.

Dr. Armstrong further elaborates on their customer relationship efforts; “We have actually organised ourselves around customer segments whereas 18 months ago Telkom was organised as a function of business. The value chain was segmented and we never had a customer focus. Telkom Enterprise is focused around business customers.”

“There isn’t one silver bullet that will create this move to Market Leader. Strategy is easy it’s the execution that’s hard. And the execution is a whole lot of little things which you have to execute properly.”

When asked whether or not Telkom Business had any specific investments for rural businesses, Dr. Armstrong explained that rural small business has been a challenge for Telkom Business and their competitors. “We are evolving our product set to meet their needs. It includes  3G, evolving our V-Sat offer and it does include extending the coverage of our traditional wire-line products.”

“Telkom Business is a substantial part of Telkom, the investments Telkom makes support the Telkom Business division. The guidance that was given last year was that Telkom will continue to spend between 20 & 25% of revenues on CAPEX. That might change in this round’s guidance. That is a lot of money and a lot of that investment will support Telkom Business,” he said. There is also going to be a component of re-establishing our brand, re-asserting that Telkom Business can hold its head up against the best in the world.”

By Angela Meadon