Telstra’s test

Telstra has announced this morning what must be one of the biggest customer feedback exercises in Australian corporate feedback – asking 18,000 people to join its “My Telstra Experience” panel.

The chosen ones will be asked to spend around 10 minutes participating in online surveys and other activities such as online discussions.

Panel members will be “voluntary” (a nice term that makes it sound like these people are doing the wider community a service) and will have the chance to win unspecified prizes.

“To keep it interesting, and provide panellists with plenty of variety, more than 60 different, brief surveys are ready to be progressively presented for panellists to complete,” the media release says.

Oh goody, sounds like fun!

There are a number of reactions that Telstra customers and entrepreneurs in general might have to this announcement. Here are some of mine, both positive and negative:

• Geez, what a publicity stunt.
  
• Hmm, a nice piece of crowdsourcing-style collaboration.
  
• Wow, are they that clueless about customer complaints? A quick web search could tell you where Telstra is going wrong.
  
• Umm, have they run out of money to pay consultants? Is that why customers are being asked to do their dirty work?
  
• Who on earth would “volunteer” for that?

In other words, I’m really not sure how this initiative is going to go. While I am sure Telstra and its new CEO David Thodey are genuine about the need to improve customer service – after all, happy customers stick around for longer and that’s important in the competitive telco sector – it is hard to believe that the company wouldn’t be very, very aware of its shortcomings in this area.

I also wonder if Telstra isn’t setting itself up for a fall by aiming so high. What happens if it doesn’t get nearly as many volunteers as it expects? And what happens if the thousands of people involved don’t see action on the areas they are complaining about?

The only solution will be for Telstra to be extremely transparent with the results of its many surveys and the actions it takes in response. If customers can see things improving, then perhaps this giant stunt will actually work.

I also wonder whether Telstra is going to like what it hears.

You can bet initial feedback will be around two areas – high prices and crappy customer service. Fixing either of these might well end up being costly in terms of lower revenue or higher costs, and you don’t need a survey of investors to tell you that any slip up in financial performance will be punished by the market.