Admitting that the company has a number of existing inefficiencies, new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company (GTT), Damian Blackburn has said $5 billion is being invested this year to fix its network to enhance the services offered to customers and businesses.
Blackburn told Sunday Stabroek in a virtual interview that among the areas of focus are improved broadband speed, the Mobile Money Guyana (MMG) service and customer service/call centre services.
He said plans are also in the pipeline to roll out the 5G LTE network, hopefully this year.
“We are spending in making our transmission network more resilient, we invested in upgrading links out of the country, so that if one of our links that joins Guyana, if the internet goes down, the other link works. We are also investing in our MMG services. We invested several million US dollars into that and it’s for everybody,” Blackburn explained.
However, he pointed out that the focus is not solely on telecoms while noting that a number of non-telecom services are also being examined.
“….We have announced investing on business development in the call centre area and we are looking at a number of things non-telecom as well,” Blackburn said.
GTT has been plagued by complaints over the years about its internet and other services. Critics have said that its 30-year monopoly on the international gateway, which ended last year, made it complacent about complaints about its various services.
Blackburn, who came to the phone company from The Bahamas, was appointed the new CEO of GTT, effective from May 3. He is said to have over two decades of experience leading major mobile, internet and TV operations and technology start-ups in competitive Caribbean, Americas and European markets. He replaced Justin Nedd.
During the interview, Blackburn explained that he promised that his first 100 days in office was dedicated to listening to the company’s team, customers and stakeholders. “I have done a lot of that. I have gone out and about… I am starting to get a sense… as to what GTT should be delivering,” Blackburn said.
After interacting with customers, Blackburn said Wi-Fi related issues seem to be a major problem faced by the majority of the population. He said once the issue is identified, measures will be put in place to address them.
“I am aware and actually agree that any organisation, GTT or otherwise…will have some inefficiency. I have been listening to customers about some of those inefficiencies they are experiencing, I have listened to the GTT team about the causes of those inefficiencies and quite frankly, the executive team at GTT are here to work every day and strive to get rid of those inefficiencies and we will,” Blackburn related.
“Struggling”
Blackburn admitted that the company has been “struggling” to deliver reliable internet in the country.
“With our copper base plant, it is old. It’s 30 years old, at least some of it. We have upgraded that plant over the years. We spent a lot of money to upgrading it to bring DSL broadband…”, he said.
He noted that currently more money is being spent to upgrade the internet service so customers can benefit from better speed.
The COVID-19 pandemic, he said, has contributed to the situation, with the huge increase in internet service due to the demands of working from home and virtual learning.
“…All networks in the world are having to look at the way those networks are engineered and try and make them last even longer because it takes a number of years to roll out fibre everywhere,” Blackburn said.
The new CEO assured that plans are in place to improve the services offered by the company.
“So I understand the frustration of our customers. We have got a plan in place to improve that service as good as we get but ultimately it will need retracing in the coming months and years and one of my roles is to make sure we have the investment available, to make sure we can get fiber in more place,” he assured.
Additionally, he said two of the other key issues existing are the service provided by the call centre and the payment of bills.
Blackburn said the past 15 months have been “very difficult” for GTT since the pandemic has also led to an increase in traffic to the call centre.
“People were demanding more services, people couldn’t go to the stores to ask questions, people are more confined to home. That means they are trying to get the service now from the call centre. We didn’t do a great job to be able to respond to the volume of calls received,” he noted.
At the same time, he said the company team needed to work from home.
To address this issue, Blackburn said GTT took a decision to immediately recruit 40 customer care agents. Twenty of these agents, he said, are expected to be on duty on Monday.
The next batch will commence training on Monday and that will last for three weeks.
As it relates to the bill payment time, Blackburn noted that in the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, stores were unable to open for business.
As such, Blackburn noted that the company took the opportunity to advertise the MMG service.
To date, there are 350 agents and over 50 percent of the customers now pay their bills via MMG.
“MMG is now our largest way of collecting bills…We want agents in every neighbourhood and we are going to encourage our customers to pay that way,” he said.
To complement this, Blackburn added, kiosks are also being installed.
