Business continuity assessment demonstrates commitment to transparency and customer satisfaction
Telstra International has today announced the completion of its latest annual Black Building Test at its London Hosting Centre (LHC) – Docklands. The tests simulate a full electrical outage to test all business continuity systems, as part of the company’s ongoing commitment to improving customer service. The process highlights the security and reliability of its hosting and telecommunications infrastructure.
Jason Friedler, Head of Hosting explains: “The Black Building Test plays a crucial role in ensuring we continue to provide our hosting customers with secure and uninterrupted services, even in the event of complete failure of the local power grid. This is a great opportunity to identify and eliminate any weaknesses in the system in a controlled environment.”
“Customers looking for potential partners can often be confused and have difficulty trusting industry claims of business continuity, the hosting and network industry generally does not share this level of transparency, or provide such detailed evidence to support claims of resilient infrastructure” explained Friedler.
The lack of transparency in the industry appears to extend beyond the safeguards of business continuity and into the means by which customer satisfaction is evaluated. To help improve customer service, Telstra International has instigated a number of initiatives aimed at empowering its staff to boost customer satisfaction. These include restructuring the organisation to allow front-line staff to be more proactive, introducing network tools to give customers more visibility and control over their network services, and consulting customers early in its strategic planning processes.
Telstra International benchmarks its customer service using the Net Promoter Score (NPS), an established and recognised method of measuring client satisfaction across a number of different service industries. “The average industry NPS is low, suggesting that few businesses are 100 per cent satisfied,” commented Murray Hankinson, Director - Corporate Development, Strategy and Global Marketing. “We are asking the industry to work together for the benefit of customers considering hosting and managed services, and to make transparency a key part of best practice. We believe that by communicating more with our customers and by talking openly about initiatives such as Black Building Tests, we can achieve a greater level of trust with our customers.”