Telstra to form 18,000 strong customer panel, again!

Stuart Corner
Monday, 07 December 2009 10:57

Opinion and Analysis

Under Sol Trujillo it was "market segmentation." At almost every investor day and annual/half year results presentation Trujillo boasted about "microsegmentation.

At Telstra's first investor day briefing under Trujillo, in November 2005, his newly appointed marketing chief, Bill Stewart announced a strategy of "customer intimacy" - a buzz phrase that Telstra had bandied about under Frank Blount almost a decade earlier! Stewart announced a massive market research programme and boasted that when it had had been completed, Telstra would have interviewed over 90,000 consumer customers and created a small business 'panel' of 16,000 businesses.

At the half year results announcement the following February these grand ambitions seemed to have diminished somewhat, but the claimed benefits were impressive nonetheless.

Trujillo said: "We have completed over 22,000 interviews across our consumer and small and medium enterprise base. We now have a much greater depth of customer research from which we have identified seven needs-based segments, 18 product segments and 126 micro segments...No segmentation work like this has ever been done in the industry that we compete in...We want to understand our customers' needs not only at the needs-base segment in terms of our lifestyle, but also at their product use in terms of how they choose to make decisions around each of those.

"And what Bill Stewart and his team have created is a segmentation model that is very complex but it's going to enable us to be very, very targeted in terms of how we interact with our customers, how we sell to our customers, how we define a customer experience for our customers and then ultimately how we operate our business."

Sounds wonderful. I wonder why they need another panel?