270 Al-Shammari
Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written
As a direct response to the liberalization program of telecommunications services,
GTCOM has been going through a transitional rebalancing program that started in 2003
and is planned to continue until the end of 2005. At the beginning of 2003, the sales and
product divisions were merged, and as a result of the combined knowledge of these two
units, GTCOM has launched its new Mobile Price Plan on June 2003. This whole
undertaking would not have been possible in the past with all of the silos or stovepipes
in place.
Following the implementation of required organizational adjustments in the transi-
tional period, GTCOM will be operating in a fully competitive environment by the end of
- Table 1 summarizes the major prospective changes that are due to take place
following the transformation of GTCOM from a monopolistic to a fully-competitive
business.
Results
Financial Performance
On the financial performance side, GTCOM has done extremely well so far in its
ability to meet the turbulent and competitive environment. The main favorable result
witnessed following the implementation of the KCRM strategy was that it offered
GTCOM good financial performance results during the first quarter of 2004. Since
GTCOM transformed its business and implemented KCRM, its net profits climbed to
about 25.2% against the same period of last year. This increase is attributed to a year-
on-year rise in gross revenues of 5%, and a reduction in costs largely due to nonrecurring
exceptional items related to restructuring, which were successfully implemented by
GTCOM in 2003.
Operational Performance
Unlike its good financial results, GTCOM’s performance was not encouraging at the
level of operational excellence (i.e., service time, lead time, quality of service, productiv-
ity) and satisfaction/loyalty of stakeholders (customers, employees, etc.). It faced and/
or is still facing the following problems:
- System’s inefficiency and customers’ expectations: the operational CRM could
not capture basic customer data; people at network department, for example, could
not trace the work flow of sales order processes, which in turn, adversely affected
the ability to meet customer expectations. This inefficiency would result in longer
order fulfillment or service completion time, low productivity, customer dissatis-
faction, and possible defect of customers to competitors. - Work flow problems: the logical work flow of sales order processes across
business units is as follows: Sales, Network, Programming, Private Branch
Exchange (PBX) between users and network, Installation, and Accounts, respec-
tively. Service delivery time now is on average one to two weeks, but was less than
one week under the old CSS provisioning and billing system. - Testing/migration problems: during the migration/testing period which lasted for
couple of days (roughly between seven to ten days), many data did not go through