Is Telstra Australia’s Amazon? – Its Customer Centric Strategy is Paying Dividends

While some may argue you cannot compare a telecommunications company with an online shopping mega star like Amazon, I beg to differ.

There is one core element both companies now share – their absolute commitment to being customer centric.

In 2009 when David Thodey took over as CEO of Australia’s largest telecommunications company, Telstra, he was asked what would differentiate his tenure from his predecessors. He said:

“I want to be an agent for the customer”.

It was a time when Australia’s highest profile company was being criticized on all fronts for its arrogance, poor customer service, unjustifiably high prices and monopolistic practices.

Thodey set about changing the culture at Telstra to a customer focused culture and invested heavily in defining and communicating internally a vision, values and strategy that had the customer at its center and customer service as its catch-cry. It included intense training of its 5,000 people leaders in Australia, India and the Philippines as well as new systems and processes that empowered customer facing staff to provide much better service to customers and solve their problems with least fuss. A new division was set up that enabled staff who heard of a friend’s problem at a barbeque to give them a direct line to a solution if they were having trouble getting it solved. Telstra embarked on a program to create advocacy with its customers and its staff. Use of the net promoter measurement system with daily feedback from thousands of customers fed to the areas in Telstra responsible was a trigger for focus on customers. Other customer feedback measures and progressive culture assessments have supported Telstra’s customer-centric journey.

Telstra: Improving Customer Advocacy

Now it is paying dividends. The company has posted seven successive half years of earnings growth to AUD$2.1 billion for this latest half – up 21% on last year. Dividends have been steady, but are now set to increase. Telstra is on a roll with its customer-centric strategy and stronger customer culture proving Thodey’s stance. Stock price is at an all-time high at around AUD$6.50 per share with steady and continuing growth up from around AUD$4.50 two years ago.

Telstra posts 22pc net profit rise

David Thodey is the first to say that Telstra still has some way to go. But his leadership of a strategy and culture in which the customer is at the center of decisions and service delivery is creating a highly sustainable profitable business.

If you want to see how it all began you will find it was originally initiated first in the Finance Group at Telstra and described in a case study about the CFO’s value service culture initiative. See Case Study Highlight: Telstra Transformation.

Telstra’s transformation story can also be found in “The Customer Culture Imperative: A Leader’s Guide to Driving Superior Performance”