David Thodey (CEO, Telstra)
22 Jun 2013 by warrencammack, No Comments »
This week I had the pleasure of hearing David Thodey talk about the power of the customer and how it’s changing Telstra’s culture.
He stated that now Telstra are putting the customer at the centre of everything, a very familiar if you’ve worked at CommBank and Thodey referenced the Bank highlighting how their seven-year journey had resulted in an organisation that is now leading the pack.
Using the example of Disney who have started to send wrist bands in-built with NFC and long-range bluetooth to customers’ homes before they arrive at a theme park. The device enables a completely personalised experience as the staff great you by name from afar and know your preferences without having to ask again. This sort of experience should be what every company aims for – using technology to enable personalisation and an amazing customer journey through every touchpoint with a company.
Bringing the experience back into the world of telecommunications David referenced Andy Rubin (inventor of the Android platform) whose vision was for people to be able to take their phone out of their pocket and it knows exactly what you want. Google are nearly there with their Google Now capability but this is only the beginning of virtual assistant like capability on phones. David made reference to Telstra’s $40M/year startup investment fund and how it was enabling them to learn more about what technologies work and how to provide other services to customers. They purchased ooyala to understand more about the content consumption behaviours of customers – presumably in order to provide targeted analytics to content creators to maximise reach.
Lastly David talked about social and highlighted Telstra’s new 24/7 app – there are now over 500k users on this platform and they are acting on tens of thousands of social support enquiries per week. Inside the organisation Telstra use Yammer and are the 8th biggest customer in the world with over 20k users, they are the 2nd most engaged (number of posts/reads/logins etc) of all Yammer’s customers.
It’s exciting to see Telstra’s shift to customer-centricity after the Sol years, David’s a passionate man and inspirational speaker – let’s see if anything changes after the election!
