Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 03 October 2006 07:09
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Now, small business. While The Australian today had got the inside running on another story unfavourable to the Trujillo regime, he was getting a good run in the Australian Financial Review with a story focussing on Deena Shiff, recently appointed managing director of small and medium enterprises.
According to the AFR, "When Sol Trujillo was appointed chief executive of Telstra last year he was shocked to find the carrier had no dedicated array of products for small businesses and no way of adequately servicing them. It was a major oversight considering Telstra has an estimated 750,000 of the country's one million small and medium sized business customers."
Shiff told the AFR that "Most corporations...find it hard to have close customer relationships with such a large and diverse group of customers...So, it was the natural thing for Sol to do to break them out."
Well, good luck Sol, but like the 'transformation' story, this conveniently glosses over at least a decade of earlier attempts to do just this.
Remember the Billy Connolly-lead advertising campaign, back in 1998? Telstra claimed it had revamped its approach to the business market: training its staff to focus on solving the communications problems of business customers.
