How do we do a better job of providing things
which are relevant for the markets you're serving
and the customers you are seeking most to get benefit from
and to deliver them really good value for money
in whatever it is that you do?
So there's a proposition piece.
And thinking about that
in a much more granular way than we have probably done in the past,
which...if I was to go back a while,
it was kind of, "Well, there's residential and there's business"
and that was kind of where it stopped.
Because there are clearly
so many more different sets of customer needs
and this whole industry's ability
to understand what customers are doing.
Um...pricing. Need I say it to this room?
The margin that each of you have,
the margin that, by the way, we have
in terms of what I need to deliver back into the business
to fund, you know, that... in the next few years,
$4.5 billion or $3.5 billion of cap ex
is absolutely critical as well.
And as I came into wholesale
and looked at the customer value survey that we do each May,
one of the things that was very clear was we are more expensive.
In some cases that's fine.
We understand there's more value attached.
In some cases, you're not in the market.
In all cases typically at Telstra, you take too long.
So we've been doing a lot of work with our pricing team
on how can we speed things up?
And we recently made a number of changes -
we are aiming, and this is the target,
so I've not yet delivered it,
but, uh...we kick off in October -
to get 40% of what has historically had to go through a bespoke process
now to get done inside the wholesale team
and much faster than going through our corporate central process
and an average 25% improvement in deal cycle time.
So in a year's time, when we come back,
I'll report to you what have we achieved.
And that's testament to the fact that we understand
we have to be a much more efficient and effective supplier
to let each of you serve your customers in a more effective way.
The next one is promotion.
And in different parts of our business, this matters,
and in some, it doesn't.
In some, we're very much an industrial input
and it's irrelevant to win customers
whose network components you're using
to deliver the service you use.
In other markets, in other segments, in other products,
what sits underneath is of very, very real interest to customers.
And so we're doing an integrated piece of work at the moment
on wholesale branding,
on how we describe what we do in wholesale
and how we might be able to let that
have a lot more visibility through into the end market.
Again, we've...
This is taking some time,
and we now have some external help in doing that.
Um...there is a commitment to do a range of things.
It's down to a sort of level of exactly what and how and where,
but it is a lot more expansive
than what you currently see in our marketing guidelines.
And again, over the course of the next few months...
And by the way,
it may take up towards the end of this calendar year
to get final resolution.
As you can imagine, it's a...it's a complex animal,
this question of branding.
And around the world in our industry,
different players that operate in multiple layers of the market
have done it in different ways.
But I am very keen, and we think there is a big opportunity,
to do things differently
from the way we've done it in the last few years.
And again, it's high relevant to some of you,
it's less relevant to others.
But that promotion piece
and how we collectively sell the value of what we do together
is part of delivering a better service,
having a market that's more informed
and ultimately enabling us to grow what customers not only use
but are also willing to use even more, and obviously to pay for.
So promotion remains absolutely key.
There's a productivity layer to this as well,
which is absolutely critical.
In other words, just doing more
with processes which are not enabling us to be more efficient
is not going to enable us to be successful.
And I mentioned digitisation
and the money we are spending as organisation there
as being absolutely a core part of that.
But there's a lot more to that productivity piece as well.
There's a lot more about working with you
to understand the full end-to-end value chain
and how we drive work into your business
and how we might do that more effectively.
And I mentioned that the simple example
of the systems that were built 15, 20 years ago
where instead of we come and tell you when something's happened,
you've gotta come and keep asking us all the time
to find out whether something happened.
So we think about the work differently.
And again, as we go through a number of the platforms
that we need to revisit over the course of the next few years
as we think about the new products
that we want to bring to market in wholesale.
Very much thinking about what's the total load in the system,
how do we minimise that to make the best customer experience,
to allow the most amount of straight-through processing,
the most amount of customer digital self-care,
where you don't need a whole lot of staff and time and complexity
and nor do we,
and we make the complex simple -
one of Telstra's sort of five internal core values.
And there's a lot of thinking being done,
but we have a lot of work to do before we turn that into reality.
Uh, and then the fifth one, of course, of the Ps, is profitability.
We're all in this as businesses.
We all have shareholders -
even not-for-profits, we have stakeholders -
and again, we have a few customers in our customer base
who have slightly different time frames
in terms of what their stakeholders are looking for.
But in every case,
we have to be doing things in a way where we are adding value,
we can demonstrate that and we can create surplus for the future,
whether that's to return to shareholders,
whether that's to invest in our business,
whether that's to enable us to do more
for the communities or the stakeholders that we serve.
And so that leans on,
"Are we being tough and rigorous on ourselves
in terms of how we run our own business?"
and in a wholesale context,
"How are we thinking about what we drive into our customers?"
So it's the flipside of the...
The productivity piece is, if you like, the per unit piece,
but we have to have a system overall
that also is driving that profitability.
And again, in terms of how can I bring things in to wholesale
that we might have historically done elsewhere,
how can we improve the product life cycle of what we're doing,
that's absolutely key.
And sorry...in the context of the five Ps,
I should of course mention product is the last one.
And that's really a multi-pronged question
about the right products for wholesale,
where we are not overengineering when that's not what customers need.
But equally, where we're saying,
"We've got some amazing networks and capability -
"how do we get the most value from those
"in a way that is going to be most beneficial to end users?"
It's about life cycle.
It is five months ago to the day
that we launched 4G in mobiles in wholesale.
Um...I won't say that it was almost five years
since we launched the very, very first 4G services
in our retail business,
but it's not far off.
I would hope and expect,
and we are working on the fact
that it...whenever we get to sort of the next generation,
it's not always a five-year lag
before we can do things in wholesale.
But clearly, as each of you do in your businesses,
there are things where you would expect to see life cycle
as a component of product.
So...that's essentially the model that we're looking at -
it's how do we think more about end users,
how do we enable you to be more successful
in whatever way you've chosen to focus your business,
and whatever we can usefully add
to what you do yourself or buy from others.