Slashing support services

It's always dangerous for a business to assume that slashing their support services will make them more efficient so the news that Telstra are cutting 500 jobs as part of a restructure of their support makes me raise an eyebrow.

When dealing with telcos, it's quite common to hit the problem of "siloing". That's where each group of employees lives in their own self contained world and rarely talks to other groups or divisions in the same company. Telstra are notorious for this.

These changes may well address part of this problem, Telstra services group managing director Michael Rocca claims " the new model would provide customers with improved service and fewer internal call transfers because more staff would be located in the same centres and receive the same training."

"We want our people to be able to assist and resolve more of our customers' issues the first time — first-call resolution and less call transfers"

That's an admirable aim and I hope he and his team achieves it. However with Bigpond's support lines still outsourced to Teletech I'm not sure how easy this will be for them. Experience has shown these outsourced services aren't well managed and probably cost Telstra both customers and money.

The real key to getting these plans to work is good management that's looking beyond short term savings in wages. The quick fix of saving money usually ends up biting technology companies hard in the medium term.

Hopefully, Telstra's management is serious about improving service rather than just looking at saving a few bucks.