Telstra is spending big to ensure its customers are getting the best services from the telco.
As the business reported its end of year financial results, it revealed it's set to spend an extra $3 billion on what it called a “major wave of customer-focused investments in its networks of the future and digitisation”.
Telstra's CEO, Andrew Penn outlined the move would centre around short term actions to remove customer pain points that would then be followed by more “significant and longer term improvement” of the customer experience, focused on digitising and simplifying large parts of the business.
“There are a number of immediate actions that we believe will improve customer experiences. We will simplify products and platforms – we need to retire old technology and systems that slow down and complicate how customers are served,” he added.
Telstra also flagged that a significant proportion of the investment would go towards transforming its networks.
“Our networks and the products and services they support are integral to the Telstra brand. Network differentiation is a long-standing contributor to our success, underpinning our clear market leadership and shareholder returns.”
The announcement comes a few months after the brand was criticised over several recent outages of its service, which let to the company having to offer free data to customers as an apology.
Telstra also just rolled out a new brand push, which centres around the theme of magic, with executive creative director for Campaign Edge, Dee Madigan, sharing her thoughts about the campaign on Gruen saying “you can't sell magic until you've nailed competence.”
Penn also said details of its investment program would be confirmed over the next few years to maintain strategic advantage in a heavily competitive environment, adding that Telstra aimed to offer a seamless and simple customer experience.
“Our customers and our networks are our biggest assets. We must invest to set new standards and deliver excellent experiences for our customers.”
“This will position us to deliver significant customer benefits and reinforce our market differentiation over the longer term,” Penn says.
Of the businesses overall results, Telstra's total income increased 3.6% to $27.1bn, with EBITDA decreasing 0.6% to $10.5bn. The company also announced it would return $1.5bn to shareholders through share buy-backs in addition to the final dividend. Shareholders can expect a total dividend for the financial year of 31.0 cents per share, up 1.6% on the prior year.
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