This was a letter I wanted to send to GCEO but eventually I didn’t have the guts to send as I now think honesty is not the best policy after all… (just for my own record - it's long and foolish)

Dearest GCEO,

I wonder how to start this email regarding my perspective on our beloved company. I would rather go anonymous but it seems impossible. Sometimes I wonder if “honesty is the best policy” is really applicable but I choose to stand firm with my principle – being honest with myself and others.

I had been working with TM for 1 year already and for sure my experience is far shallow as compared with your good self. As an amateur, I truly believe the essence of the company is the product and the service. When we talk about product, we stress on the quality; when we mention about the service, we talk about the people who deliver it, our TM staff.

TM Personnel

KPI vs Passion

It has become common that KPI has been a ‘thing’ every employee wishes to achieve in order to have a luxurious bonus by the end of the year and everyone seems to have achieved them pretty well. In the end, it would be at the GM’s hand/favor that an employee would prosper or perish. The so-called “Key Performance Indicator” has been a lie to cover eyes.

Needless say, ‘passion’ is the key which determine the success of the company. One passionate staff is 10 times better than ten employees who stress on pursuing their KPI in order to achieve high performance level. What even worse is that people fake their passion towards company just to please the higher management.

No doubt KPI is important to manage a large corporate but what use are KPIs when they turn to lies? 1 problem resolved is definitely better than 10 problems hidden under table pretending nothing happen as the saying goes by, ‘paper could never wrap the fire’.

So why people lose their passion to TM?

Training

A proper training to kick-start a passionate employee is very essential. I’ve seen many lose interest working for TM for not being able to apply their education on what they’re working, e.g. a fresh graduate accountant sent to direct sales team. These accountants have no idea what to do and they have limited live example to learn from and eventually they lost their way and fade up with their work. This is how and why the sales from our own sales team seems weaker from reseller.

There are many other examples but the main point is they do not know what they are doing, leading them to despair and fade up. That is why professional and specific training should be given to enhance their skills and passion.

Workload

Workload has always been an issue in many corporate whereby some department seems to be relaxing while some stress themselves and sacrifice their time dedicating themselves to the company. It is no doubt that TM is too large to enable/ensure the balance in workload for every single employee. It really depends on the initiative driven by each leader in the department and surely every leader has different expectation and this create a substandard in judging the performance of the employees.

It has always been true that it is essential to find the right people to guard at the right post with no bias in order to ensure the legacy of the company.

Discipline

Discipline has always been an issue regardless time and location. It has been too many cases whereby employee(s) has not been performing but achieve a mismatch performance level given by superior. ‘Lie to cover the eyes’, people has been reluctantly to defy such incidents regarding it would be effortless and harmful to own career. It is such people who drag the company from moving further while enjoying the benefits of company – parasites.

How better company would be if such people are identified and be removed or reassure their passion towards the prosper of company.

Customer Service vs Incentive

The quality of customer service has been the greatest challenge and most essential to retain more customers on this 21^st century. We are losing far behind if we are to compare ourselves with other TelCo (Celcom, Maxis, and Digi). Nevertheless, their customer service is not perfect but far advance than ours. We mostly fail in getting the sincere feedback from customers and then improve our customer service.

“Lies to cover eyes” once more, I knew this when I was training at TM Point seeing the staff hiding the feedback forms and box from customers to prevent customer awareness in giving feedback. Eventually, the feedback might be filled by staff in order to please statistics. Probably the incentives for the front liners may not be well enough to cultivate their passion towards their work. I said this because I’ve seen front liners abandon their post asking customer to wait while filling the forms to claim OT. This shows their desperation for extra income and forgot their passion in customer service.

Furthermore, our call center (100) seems unprofessional for being unable to answer the customer’s enquiries with precision and confidence; what worse is customer has been given wrong information and this cause frustration. This links back to professional training to enrich our customer service.

We should learn from others on how to improve customer service and it is alright to copy their ideas if they are good ones. As Sun Tze’s Art of War says: “We shall win the war every time if we distinguish both ourselves and the enemies well.”

Internal Fraud

No doubt internal fraud has been the key challenge to resolve and further help the company save a lot of money than expected. Internal fraud has been happening almost in every big corporate contributing 60% of total fraud as stated in the KPWG report.

Many know that major internal fraud in TM has been happening in procurement matters for vendors as well as service provisioning / sales for customers. It has been well known that at least 3 quotations are required to enable purchasing of services/system and due to the loopholes, our company has been paying unnecessary/extra money to vendors for the price quoted may not be the best price. Delay in service provisioning by processors on sales by our own team, giving privilege to resellers (such that processors are able to earn commission) damage our customer service quality.

I may not have the proof but just as the KPWG report, they obtain feedback from staffs anonymously to enable such statistics being produced – the real facts.