Telstra wants to become the Uber of Telstra

Telstra wants to become the Uber of Telstra. CEO Andrew Penn today said, at an investor day, that customer experience is a core concern for the company's future. The carrier's customers don't benchmark Telstra against other telcos, he said, but agains the likes of Uber and Airnbnb. Telstra's therefore going to use those …

[Anonymous Coward]

"…say Telstra aspires to be a technology company…"

Aspires to be a technology company?!!! Did I read that right?!

IT ONCE WAS A TECHNOLOGY COMPANY!

It was until you marketeers got hold of it and ran it into the ground. They developed all kinds of telecommunications kit back in the day to solve problems that they, and similar companies had. Most of the patents they came up with have now expired. That's how long ago it was!

Then new management came in, gave all the engineers redundancies, and threw it all away.

[Terafirma-NZ]

Do they know what others do

Do they even know what makes these other companies so good at what they do? I bet they have missed the point that Uber focuses on providing ride sharing and has not got into the car leasing business or even into the road repair business.

Telstra for all it's ambitions just can't keep to the fact it is an ISP and needs to focus on being one instead of building 3 different clouds, firewall management, network services and the rest.

you want to make it successful then get back to being a carrier and focus on networks. Sure you can build other business but do so with a dedicated team focused on a single strategy separate tot he core business.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Do they know what others do

Actually, they're not, they're a telecommunications provider, been that for decades before they owned an ISP.

The thing is, they once had a very highly respected position as a telecommunications innovator and a member of the ITU. Sure, much of the technology they invented, the general public didn't actually see in person, but they developed it in order to link telephones across the country.

Telecom Australia had a fully automatic system long before the US. They were selling designs for exchanges to many overseas telcos at the time, as well as software to manage it all. They also did a lot of R&D, but in some cases, didn't persue the inventions as they weren't "core business".

These days, I don't think even they know what their "core business" is.

[Roland6]

Re: Do they know what others do

Do they know what they do?

I ask as I don't get the rationale for the comment "The carrier's customers don't benchmark Telstra against other telcos, he said, but against the likes of Uber and Airnbnb."

However, I do understand that as a carrier and hence largely invisible until they prevent customers gaining access to services such as Uber and Airbnb.

[Big-nosed Pengie]

Using Telstra is its own punishment.

[Likkie]

Not what they once were....

Both my personal and business experience of Telstra (living and working in a small regional city) is that where once Telstra was the go to service provider for mobile and Internet they are now merely an also-ran.

They once provided an expensive but reliable premium product and good customer service. They are still expensive but their product quality is not premium anymore and their customer service is woeful. The customer service staff whilst very friendly and pleasant are not actually very helpful because they are limited to following a script and are unable to do anything beyond that. At a technical level it takes a gargantuan effort to get to speak to anything remotely like someone who can understand and then resolve anything but the simplest of problems.

My employer uses Telstra Managed WAN and the service operates flawlessly. However, if I need to have any adds or changes made it takes an eternity and is usually implemented incorrectly the first time around.

They over communicate mostly meaningless and cryptic messages that provide little detail and they are so focussed on customer feed back they are actually turning that into a negative. Every time I deal with them I am asked to provide feedback in some way, by email, SMS or tone/voice response.

It is unbelievably annoying when you deal with Telstra as many times each week as I do.

Wow, what a rant, but I do feel a bit better. We must do this again some time. :)