The Optus Outage Wasn’t Their Worst Failure On November 8

Hey, everyone, and welcome to the live edition of Talking Points with Jason. As you know, every fortnight I have a newsletter called Talking Points with Jason that comes out. You can subscribe to that on LinkedIn or on my website. But each day I'm going to come live to you with a two to three minute insight for something that's happening in the business world in real time to help you take the lessons and apply them to your business so that you can grow and break through. So here in Australia Yesterday, that being November 8, 2023, the second largest telecommunications company in Australia, Optus, had a significant network outage basically from 4am on November 8 for somewhere between 10 and 11 hours. Customers had no mobile phone service, they had no Internet service. Most of the home phone services were also disconnected because of course they use effectively the Internet to deliver. If you had a point of sale payment system where you can tap your credit card at a shop and that was connected via Optus, well then that didn't work as well and it impacted everyone. There was no discrimination. It didn't matter whether you were just a regular consumer, whether you were a small business owner or if you were one of the one of Australia's largest banks. If you were with Optus, well, you were disconnected effectively. So even if you weren't a customer of Optus, it was really difficult to avoid being interrupted from them. Now we're basically a cashless society. It's certainly where we're moving towards. So imagine going to pick up your coffee in the morning without cash and not being able to get your coffee because, well, they can't take your cards. Imagine trying to ring your bank to get your house to settle, for your mortgage to go through, but you can't contact your bank because they've got no Internet services, they've got no phone services. It was a significant event and there is no way other than to describe it than call it a crisis. And of course, it was only a couple of years ago, I think less than two years ago, that Optus had a significant cyber attack where they leaked the data of, or released the data of a number of their consumers, who then also had to get new driver's licenses, new passports, whole range of issues. So this brand has had a bittering, they did not need a crisis like this, nor did the customers. Now, while it is a significant issue that your entire network goes down and your CEO hops on TV and says we don't know what caused it, that wasn't the biggest failure on November 8th, in my opinion. The biggest failure on November 8th and this is the lesson was the way they handled the situation, the crisis management, if you will. You see customers have a pretty decent right to expect that you're going to get it right. They expect that they buy a mobile phone service from you, that it's going to work. But they also have a reasonable expectation that if something goes wrong, you're going to make it right. And this is what didn't happen yesterday. So they didn't provide regular updates on the situation and progress towards fixing it. Their website had three sentences which were pretty vague. A key detail that was missing in almost every piece of communication from them was when they were going to give us, the consumer, the customer, an update. You see, in a crisis, while customers will expect you to know everything, if you don't know everything, the next best thing you can do for them is, is to tell them when you'll give them more information. The more times you show up, when you say you're going to show up with more information or an update, the more you start to restore trust and confidence that you do what you say you're going to do. I've actually worked for both Telstra, Australia's largest telecommunication company, and Optus in the enterprise space. I know in most of the enterprise contracts, certainly when I was in the industry, they all had times specified in the contract on how quickly you had to update the client if there was a major outage. Now critical one outage that this would definitely be described as would in some customers require a 15 minute update, in others would require an hourly update. And there were some consequences for not doing that. And yes, sometimes those calls would be high. There is no, no real meaningful update, but you had to do it anyway. So what I'm saying in a crisis is you need to just commit to giving your customers a, a guidepost for when they can expect an update, even if at that two hour mark, if that's when you're going to give them the next update, there is no significant news to, to share. It's about starting to restore confidence and restoring trust. Now the other thing that went wrong yesterday was that they didn't prepare their customer service teams for the inevitable. Now during the day you could actually web chat with Optus in some instances, I believe through their app and whatnot. But, and I'm not sure the logistics around how that was working and their network wasn't working, but that doesn't matter. And now they of course had some scripted replies. We're dealing with a major outage. We apologize for the inconvenience. However, once the network was restored, they hadn't trained their customer service teams on what to do then. Now I was a customer of Optus up until, call it, 6pm yesterday at as soon as my service restored, I started the process of moving my phone to another carrier. Now, it's a fairly simple process here in Australia and usually it happens all within a few minutes, but an hour went by and nothing had happened and I was a little bit concerned that that could cause some problems down the track and I'd have to have some more effort. So anyway, I reached out to the Optus team and said, look, just letting you know I've approved that I'm porting out so I don't need to stay. Stay with your network, please. I haven't got the text message but please just push through. And the response I got was, can you tell us exactly why you want to leave? Now, I've had multiple customer service issues with Optus and the last one went for a month and they didn't fix it. So there's more than one reason, but a 10 hour outage certainly was the icing on the cake or the straw that broke the camel's back, whatever you want to say. And so I was like, really? Like, I know it's not your fault, but that question just doesn't make any sense to me. Once again, I'm happy to leave. And then I got a reach out from their customer retention team. What do you think the customer retention team's job is? Well, clearly it's to try and keep me perfectly okay that they reached out. What was not okay was that they reached out with exactly the same script. Can you tell me exactly why you're leaving? We apologize for the inconvenience of today's outage. I'm not authorized to offer you anything, but if you just stay around for a few days, maybe that will change. What? You have a team called the customer retention team. You had 10 hours to prepare them for the inevitable, which would be many, many customers wanting to go somewhere else because trust was destroyed. Nothing was done to restore trust. And brands were jumping on this, like other mobile phone companies were saying, had some great marketing activities to be in the conversation, in the moment. Even the soda drink Sprite did some clever little bit of social media around, around the event. So they should have been prepared that people were going to leave. And I'm not suggesting that they should automatically hand out some sort of compensation for the event. What I'm saying is they should have created a process that if they needed to buy two or three days to decide how they were going to handle the situation, that they had really trained their team up with some quick and easy steps to try and keep the customers there for two or three days. And that alone would have saved them some customers. But no, they didn't. So anyway, I'm no longer an Optus customer and I'm sure at some point I might be lured back. But regardless, they didn't train their team. They had 10 hours to train their team on the inevitable and they didn't. They didn't have to get it perfect. But doing nothing was definitely not the right case. And now here's the clincher for me, it's the next day and customers have not received an email or an SMS or any form of communication to say, this is what's happened, this is what we're doing to minimize the chance of it ever happening again and we're sorry and we value you. Now, yes, the CEO has done some public media, some public interviews. I saw a clip that she was on a news channel last night. Not everyone watches the news, but every single customer was impacted by your outage. How hard would it have been to pen a note to them or record a video and send it to them to apologize for the situation and try and start to restore that confidence? Now, you don't have to have an event like the size of the Optus one. You don't have to have a business the size of Optus to take some lessons from this. So here are the learnings. If you are faced with a situation where you have significantly let down your customer. Now it can be a customer or all your customers. Here are the learnings. First of all, start to work to build confidence quickly that you are working to resolve the situation. I don't know what's wrong or how this has happened, but here are the next things that I'm doing to try to understand the situation and to resolve the situation. And commercially, you may not be able to give them the exact details, but give them some sense that you've got some control around this. The next step is you've got to build confidence by communicating with them regularly. And if you think you're communicating enough, communicate a little bit more because it will never be enough for everybody. And one extra email or one extra livestream is not going to hurt you. So communicate regularly. And importantly, set milestones where your customers can expect you to show up with some information. Now, this also applies to your employees internally. They need to be on the front foot they should be getting the messages ideally a little bit earlier than your customers are. And I'm not talking just about your customer service teams. Everyone in the organization, the barbecue conversation on this weekend that happens where an Optus employee turns up and someone says, oh, I'm an Optus customer. I don't know why you really need that person to feel empowered to have a conversation in a meaningful way. Greater opportunity to empower your employees as well as to start building confidence with your customers. Then while your teams are busy fixing the problem, you also need to be thinking about or assign someone the responsibility on getting any customer facing teams up to speed on what to do right now about inquiries, but what to do when the problem is solved. And again, it doesn't have to be perfect, but they but your customer has to have this sense that you're moving towards a better state. And then after the event, apologize. Tell your customers what you're doing to make sure it doesn't happen again. Where you can tell them why it occurred and how unusual it was or what the situation was. But start to regain your customers trust. Do multiple steps. Do each of these steps and you will find that customers, while they won't be delighted that they've had a significant disruption, they will start to have confidence that they've chosen the right person, the right organization. Because although you didn't get it right, you're making it right. And that's the key. So if you want to breakthrough in business, it's not about being perfect all the time. It's about making it right when it goes wrong and learning from it so that you can improve your business going forward and build lifetime customers. Build customers that advocate for your business. I'm Jason S. Bradshaw. If there's anything I can do to help you, please reach out Jason sbradshaw. Com for all my contact details. Until next time, stay well and break through in your business.