Telstra to invest $2.3b to improve the customer experience

Australia’s Telstra has revealed plans to invest up to A$3 billion ($2.3 billion) over the next few years on improving the customer experience following a wave of recent network outages.

The operator has revealed plans to increase its capex to sales ratio to 18%, the highest since the operator was building its 3G network in the 2008-09 financial year.

Telstra CEO Andrew Penn said the investments include plans for consumers, SMBs, domestic and international enterprise users, governments and wholesale customers, as well as both fixed and mobile networks.

Short term actions to address frequent customer complaints will be followed by more significant and longer term investments aimed at digitising to improve the customer experience and reducing costs.

“There are a number of immediate actions that we believe will improve customer experiences. We will simplify products and platforms – we need to retire old technology and systems that slow down and complicate how customers are served,” Penn said.

He said investments will be aimed at evolving the network with new technologies including virtualization and increased automation. The company aims to develop a flexible, software-defined network architecture.

The move comes as Telstra seeks to win back customers following a series of hardware-related network outages that were heavily reported in Australian media.

Telstra had already committed A$50 million towards installing new monitoring equipment and improving the capacity of its mobile network to handle large volumes of simultaneous re-registrations.