CAMERON MILNER: Telstra’s handling of national outage a lesson in how not to respond in a crisis
CAMERON MILNER: Whether it was its missing CEO or its hollow apologies to customers, Telstra’s response to its national outage shows a corporate behemoth that’s both arrogant and out of touch.
Telstra’s response to its recent nationwide mobile outage was the moment when Aussies rightfully said “Not happy Jan” to Telstra.
Telstra needed to be calling its own triple-0 line such was their corporate emergency.
It was just a terrible look from go to whoa. Its was a communications company no one could get through to and an aloof and out of touch executive team.
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The response by wheeling out a hapless chief financial officer was only the start of Telstra’s problems.
This is a company that smugly stood by as its arch rival Optus suffered its own outage and interruption to the triple-0 line.
It tells us about the massive coverage it supposedly has and charges a premium to its customers for its service based on reliability and quality.
So why then with its army of lobbyists and communications consultants could Telstra stuff it up so badly?
The crisis response from this corporate behemoth that believes itself too big to fail was sluggish at best, arrogant at worst.
CFO Michael Ackland looked like a crash test dummy facing down a B-triple. He said the right words of apology but they rang hollow.
Telstra waited hours before calling the Federal Communications Minister Anika Wells to tell her of the outage. Chief executive Vicki Brady was absent for days while her underling was left to do damage control. The pathetic excuse she was on a family holiday doesn’t wash.
Brady is a massively overpaid CEO who is barely seen and is running a telco gutted of key staff and with a maintenance program that looks to be a decade or more overdue.
The irony that in a globally connected world the CEO couldn’t make contact with the outside world beggars belief.
Sure, she might’ve had to interrupt sucking back martinis in the Mediterranean for a moment, but she could have jumped on the blower and called into an Australian media conference, done an interview or two.
Instead, she was as silent as the millions of her customers’ phones that also weren’t working.
Then there’s all the people who rely on Telstra to run their businesses, charge customers or need the apps to do their work. The response looked arrogant and out of touch. this just isn’t how a modern crisis needs to be managed.
Think back to the Viva energy fire at the refinery in Geelong in the midst of a fuel crisis in Australia. Chief executive Scott Wyatt was up in the middle of the night, in contact with the Federal Government immediately. He drove from his house to the refinery through the dark hours and stood up at 8am for a national press conference.
That’s what a true CEO does in the midst of a crisis.
Instead, we have Brady thinking she’s done us all a favour by jetting back into Australia.
The fact that 48 hours after the outage her CFO couldn’t confirm when or where the CEO would be available to speak and take responsibility shows just what a total s..t show their response had become.
Telstra must take responsibility for this catastrophic failure of such an essential service.
Brady should follow her whistling mascot over the horizon.
But we also need to once and for all fix the triple-0 emergency line fiasco.
The truth is that no telco should have a monopoly on whether people can connect to the emergency services.
In Canada, by law, even phones without a SIM card must be able to reach emergency services.
It’s not technically difficult. The Federal Government should move to the re-nationalise the triple-0 service and have all telcos pay for and provide the service across all of their coverage, regardless of the carrier.
The Federal Government should also throw the book at Telstra. It’s time to hang up on Telstra’s trite excuses and throw the book at them.
For too long companies think customers should just cop it and accept their failings without compensation. That’s got to stop, so executives like Brady know customers and consumers come first, second and third.
They need to be made a corporate example of.
We are approaching an AI-based future reliant on data centres to connect us to the world, and we need reliable communications services.
Wells is a very accomplished minister and I have no doubt that having learnt from the Optus debacle that Telstra will now be taught an even stronger lesson.
No amount of corporate gifts and freebies from Telstra should be able to buy a leave pass on this failure.
Telstra needs to stop putting out mega profits and spend money on the hard infrastructure and the staff needed to run a modern telecommunications company.
Telstra needs to get the message loud and clear from punters, politicians and businesses that rely on Telstra doing its one job — keeping the rest of us connected wherever we want to go.
