Tips for Pinky: how to fix Telkom
The announcement last week that Pinky Moholi was finally taking over at Telkom appears to be the first good move that everyone’s favourite telecoms operator has made in a long time.
Unfortunately for Moholi, she is only being appointed to the job now – and not in 2005 when Papi Molotsane got the job – leading to her resigning her position at Telkom and beginning her exile from the operator.
I say this is unfortunate because for the last five years Telkom has been largely rudderless: first feeding off the profits of Vodacom and wasting them on a failed attempt to get into Africa, and then desperately trying to catch up with the mobile operators once it had rid itself of Vodacom.
The biggest problem that Telkom faces is that for more than 10 years the company has been giving the shareholders exactly what they wanted while completely ignoring what the customers wanted.
While I do not have an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of Telkom, I have a few ideas about what Moholi should be doing to get Telkom back on track.
First and foremost, Telkom needs to create a culture of innovation within the organisation.
It seems to me that people inside Telkom are incentivised to maintain the status quo, to keep things running just as they are. This is not a culture that makes life better for the customer or ensures the long-term sustainability of the business.
Telkom needs to be driving innovation, figuring out new ways to get people to use its infrastructure and this does not come from the top down. It comes from ordinary employees having bright ideas and management allowing those ideas to flourish.
The simple fact is that the rest of the telecoms industry in South Africa is eating Telkom for breakfast means that it is time for the company to go on the offensive.
Secondly, Moholi needs to fix the customer service organisation at Telkom.
There appears to be a culture at Telkom that says ‘The customer is always wrong.’
If you cancel a line and for some reason the paperwork gets lost in the system, you are more likely to find yourself owing large amounts of money and speaking to Telkom’s lawyers than having your problem solved.
This worked fine when Telkom was the only game in town, but that isn’t the case any longer and it is time to teach the people in the call centre to respect the customer and to quickly find solutions to their problems.
Thirdly, Moholi need to find a way to reconnect all those customers that have been screwed over by cable theft.
When I say reconnect I mean find a way to deliver reliable and cost effective voice and data services to all of them at the same cost that they would pay for a normal phone line.
Use wireless. Run fibre. The method shouldn’t matter, but many of these customers are either eking out an existence on the verges of the cellular networks or being taken to the cleaners by said cellular networks.
Surely a little good faith on Telkom’s part would get these people back as loyal customers?
Finally (and I use this only in the context of this article because I could go on for a long time), she needs to sort out the unions.
The telecommunications industry is one of rapid change, and unions don’t like change.
Telkom, whether it likes it or not, is going to face massive changes in the next two years. The advent of local loop unbundling (LLU) is going to change the face of the business at Telkom, and unionized labour is going to be the most affected by this.
If the unions aren’t on board then they are going to go out of their way to make it difficult for Telkom to change, and that is no good for either customers or shareholders.
Mostly Telkom needs to tell its shareholders that they need to expect reduced returns for the next few years as the company tries to win back customers who are, quite frankly, pissed off with the company for taking advantage of them for as long as we can remember.
Get these customers back and the profits will follow. Continue to ignore them and the tragic spiral of Telkom will continue in perpetuity.
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