Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1238637
23.04.2020 8 OPINION You joined Melita as its new CEO in 2016. How have you found the experience been till now? What were the challenges you experienced, and how have you changed the company? It's been exciting, challenging, and extremely rewarding. When I arrived, Melita had just been acquired by new owners who had a vision to transform the company into the best telecommu- nications business in Malta. It's fair to say that back in 2016 Melita had a poor reputation, particularly in the area of customer service, so one of my first objectives was to address this, working with the existing team on new processes, and bringing in new people with external expertise. Today, this is one of the areas where Melita has really changed, we hear this in feedback from our customers, we see it in the high customer satisfaction scores we get, and we feel it from the reduction in employee turnover in our customer care team. Another step we took to address the poor reputation was a re-brand in 2017. Rather than a cosmetic change, the re- branding was about aligning our em- ployees behind one vision, and one set of values; building our employees' pride in Melita and enhancing our teamwork so we are better able to meet our cus- tomers' expectations. In parallel, we have of course main- tained our focus on innovation and bringing the best telecommunications technology to Malta. We are now the only company in Mal- ta able to deliver gigabit 1,000 Mbps in- ternet nationwide and we have a rolled out a state-of-the-art new mobile net- work across Malta and Gozo which is fully NB-IoT enabled, making our net- work the most powerful in Europe. Overall, since 2016 we have seen business growth alongside significant improvements in Melita's reputation, brand health and employee satisfaction. Melita might have been criticised in the past for its customer care services. Are you confident this situation has now been remedied? I can confidently say that we have turned this around. One of the early actions was to instigate customer sat- isfaction ratings across our care, repair, install and retail teams. Our scores were initially very low, but for the last couple of years we have maintained an overall customer satis- faction of 8.9 out of 10, and for the last three months we have achieved 9.1 out of 10 – a score any business locally or internationally could be proud of. at, of course, does not mean that we are perfect – we always aim for 10 out of 10 - but it does mean that we have made very significant progress and that our customers are increasingly satisfied with the service they receive from Melita. We continue to make improvements, for example we have made it much eas- ier for customers to contact us through chat services on our website and Face- book Messenger. Our investments in training and sys- tems have also enabled us to cope very well with the challenges presented by the current pandemic. All our customer care team have, in fact, been able to work remotely and as a result we have been able to con- tinue offering a seamless service, with high satisfaction scores, at a time when both business and personal customer requirements have changed and inten- sified. Earlier in April, Monaco Telecom completed a €250 million acquisition of Vodafone Malta. Tamas Banyai, who will take over as CEO of the Malta operation, said the company "will be focusing on network investment and customer experience." Does Melita feel this acquisition will change the local telecommunications landscape, and how? Competition in Malta, where the mar- ket is relatively small, the physical envi- ronment challenging, and economies of scale hard to achieve, is already fierce. All the operators in Malta have, over the years, worked hard to ensure they have good networks, good service and competitive pricing. We can see the outcome of this col- lective effort, for example, in the last EY Malta Attractiveness report which highlighted how significant the strength and quality of Malta's communications infrastructure has been in attracting foreign investment. e arrival of a new operator will, inevitably, bring new ideas and ener- gy to the market. I'm confident, how- ever, that Melita has a strong strategy going forward that will see us continue to grow our customer base and market share. Do you expect that Monaco Telecom could increase in the level of competition locally and does Melita have plans in place to counter this in terms of the services it provides? As I mentioned, competition in Mal- ta is already fierce so I don't think the level of competition will change much. Obviously, Monaco Telecom will bring a new approach and may innovate in new ways. From Melita's point of view, we always welcome competition as it drives im- provements across the market, but we also have confidence that our existing strategy is the right one. In November last year, Melita launched a new data centre facility as well as Internet of Things connectivity services across Europe. What is the value of these substantial investments for the company, its consumers and the Maltese economy? Melita is investing significantly in In- ternet of ings technology especially in the connectivity that sensors need to be always connected to the Internet. In Malta we have deployed NB-IoT in 100% of Malta and Gozo. NB-IoT is probably the most promising con- nectivity type for IoT as it reaches ex- tremely good coverage including in underground facilities (cellars and ga- rages) and allows sensors to work with extremely low battery consumption. An NB-Iot based sensor can live up to 5G, the Internnet of ings and the changing landscape in telecommunications... Melita Limited CEO Harald Roesch gives BusinessToday a rundown on the telecoms giant's achievements and future plans MASSIMO COSTA A key enabler to Malta's