Telstra survey will miss 70 percent of small businesses, says SETEL

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 08 December 2005 09:33

IT Industry - Strategy

The Small Enterprise Telecommunications Centre (SETEL) has questioned Telstra's claims that will greatly improve its focus on small businesses, in part by surveying some 16,000 of them. On SETEL's estimate. Telstra will miss up to 70 percent of the small business sector.

Telstra announced in early November that it was planning its largest ever survey of small businesses to help it refine its strategy for this market. It said it would select the participants from its own customer databases and external sources.

In its latest newsletter, SETEL says it is "more than sceptical of Telstra's ability to either correctly identify small businesses or, to reach them."

It claims that "Telstra uses its own definition of a small business (which includes medium businesses). Therefore it will consult medium sized businesses to develop strategies targeted for small businesses...[and] when Telstra recruits small businesses to interview, Telstra will overlook huge components of the small and home business sector."

SETEL says this is because "many small micro and home businesses do not advertise in the Yellow Pages, which Telstra will use as its basic database to select its 16,000 small business participants."

SETEL claims to have "researched the home and micro business sector and discovered its unique telecommunications needs and characteristics" and it says that "all of this critical information will be ignored or understated because of Telstra's skewed methodology."