turk-internet.com Note : This article is part of “2007 Evaluation from CEO’s Own Words” File which is preparing for turk-internet.com specially from CEOs of Companies who are working in Turkey.
Romtelecom is the ex-telephony monopoly of Romania now owned 54% by OTE of Greece and 46% by the Romanian Government. The Company in the last 5 years has gone through consecutive restructuring projects and from 40.000 employees has reached at the end of 2006, 12.500 employees. However during the same year the company reached a record level of churn. During the last four months of the same year the company was loosing as an average 70-80.000 customers/month.
The same trends continued during the first 4-5 months of 2007.
I was appointed as CEO of Romtelecom on February 1st, 2007. Obviously my number one priority was to stop the bleeding. Following a couple of months of analysis and study on late May and early June, for the first time in the history of Romtelecom, new packages offering free call minutes were introduced to the market together with 50% discount to the ADSL prices (Clicknet service), doubling the speed of Internet access etc.
This policy was continued during the summer months, the autumn and finally during the Christmas and New Year period with bundled offers of voice, ADSL, PC and satellite TV. During the same months the majority of the top management team was also replaced. As a result of this effort Romtelecom managed during November and December to achieve positive customer growth after three years of continuous customer losses (1.5 million losses out of 4.5 million customers in December 2004.
Another point that has to be underlined is that although Romtelecom is still the main fixed telephony operator on the Romanian market, 5 years after its liberalization, till 2007 the company didn’t succeed to position itself as a leader on the new fast growing segments, such as broadband and digital television.
This challenge was addressed the past year through a new commercial approach, called Customer 1st and based on a simple principle: “more benefits for the customers, at the same price or even at a lower one”. Yet, Customer 1st doesn’t mean only better offers, but also a closer attention granted to our clients, during every encounter they had with our personnel, either we talk about sales persons in the shops, client services operators or technicians; shortly, we started truly changing the relationship with our customers. For broadband this meant that we took over the leadership in terms of growth rate on the fixed broadband Internet market, compared to any of our competitors – we reached approx. 20% market share at the end of 2007, from approx. 7-8% at the end of 2006. We finished the year with about 360,000 clients for ClickNet and we may say that we are now closer to our motto: broadband in every home& office in Romania.
That’s why Romtelecom can be considered a pioneer which changed for good the dynamics on the communications market. Romtelecom’s capacity to innovate, to come up with more benefits for its clients, to re-invent the way they can be approached really made the difference in 2007. In the autumn of last year we launched with great success, for the first time at national level on the Romanian market, the bundle laptop/PC and broadband connection. Again, this was a measure taken for the first time in the company’s history. The reaction to our offer was amazing, we sold over 25,000 computers and installations went up by 119%. Due to the huge demand we also had some delays in delivery, which showed us that we have to prepare better for such future programs. Broadband helps us to differentiate ourselves from the other players on an extremely competitive market, as it is the Romanian one: the 2007 growth rate, 280%, is based first of all on the quality of our services and our customer care. And the good news we want to improve even more.
With regards Dolce (our digital satellite launched in Dec.2006) TV offering the company managed to reach 400.000 customers at the end of 2007 (and currently very close to 500.000).
Having achieved to bring the company back to the Romanian market now for the next three years (2008- 2010) our target is profitable growth. While the company in one hand will continue its marketing offensive on the other hand is progressing into an extensive restructuring and redefinition of its end to end processes. As a result of this, the company is expected to reduce in 2008 its workforce by 2000-2500 employees covering all fields of activities.
However it has to be pointed out that our initiative “Customer 1st” is going to be strengthened even further in order to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the market with the quality of the services provided to our customers.
Turkish translation of this article can be reach by clicking here
Kaynak : 