Marketing 12th Edition by Charles Lamb,Charles Lamb,Joe Hair

Exercise 11

TELEKOM AUSTRIA GROUP: SUSTAINABILITY TO INCREASE VALUE
Telekom Austria Group is the largest telecommunications provider in Austria, where it has over two million fi xed net lines. The company has close to 20 million mobile subscribers in its eight geographic markets and each market is served by a separately identified subsidiary within the Telekom Austria Group:
→ A1 Telekom Austria
→ Mobiltel in Bulgaria
→ velcom in Belarus
→ Vipnet in Croatia
→ Si.mobil in Slovenia
→ Vip mobile in Republic of Serbia
→ Vip operator in Republic of Macedonia
→ Mobilkom Liechtenstein

The overarching goal of the company is to be the most innovative and efficient telecommunications provider in the central and eastern European marketplace. Driving the attainment of this goal are four corporate values: innovation, diversity, responsibility, and quality. Through these values, the company aspires to be profitable while satisfying a wide range of stakeholders. These stakeholders include: customers, employees, employee union, shareholders/ investors, suppliers, municipalities, neighbors, NGOs, public policy makers, and special interest groups. The company prides itself on its group-wide corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts that seek to provide benefit to all stakeholders.
Sustainability both Internally and Externally
As an information and communications technologies (ICT) company, Telekom Austria Group seeks to expand and further develop environmentally friendly technologies. One area that the company has a keen interest in is the virtualization of products and services. In the words of the company, think "data traffic instead of road traffic." Examples of such virtualization due to ICT are: music and film downloads instead of the purchase of CDs and DVDs; online tax filing instead of using paper to fi le via the mail service; video conferencing instead of traveling for meetings; and tele-working instead of making the daily commute to the physical office. Sustainability efforts for ICT at Telekom Austria include: reducing CO₂ emissions, energy efficiency at computer centers, intelligent use of resources by managing capacity according to volume usage, converting to green electricity, using employees as environmental ambassadors, and conserving resources with its motto of "reduce - reuse - recycle." The company's resource conservation efforts flow directly to customers via online billing, a green signature for e-mails so as to encourage reduction of unnecessary printing, mobile phone recycling, toner collection tied to charitable giving (one euro is donated for each toner cartridge collected), and the production of environmentally friendly phones.
ICT Integration into Customer's Lives
ICT is an indispensible aspect of everyday life in the 21st century. At the business-to-consumer (B2C) level, its use appears in everything from social media communications (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) to shopping to online banking to online education. From a business-to business (B2B) perspective, ICT enables everything from product routing via RFID tags to data security. Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags emit radio waves that are decoded by a reading device for the purposes of identification of inventory and tracking. Given the importance of ICT in the lives of all customers, Telekom Austria considers customer service to be a critical success factor for the company. The company's A1 Service Center was the first Austrian service center in the mobile communications industry to be certified according to the new European standard for customer care centers. In 2009, the company launched a new customer service program called "Kundiologie." With the motto of "Meet the Customer," the company attempts to engage its employees in real-time interactions with customers and then channels these insights into the areas of product management and customer service. Thus, the company ties customer satisfaction to its employees in an active manner. As such, employees, particularly those working in customer service departments, receive regular training in customer relationship management and customer service.
Respondents in a 2009 customer satisfaction survey gave employees in the Technical Customer Service department at Telekom Austria scores of "excellent" for their expertise, friendliness, and solutions-oriented attitudes. Additionally, respondents were also highly satisfied with issues related to product installation and waiting times. The importance of customer satisfaction is driven home internally by the fact that a customer satisfaction measure has been incorporated into performance contracts of employees in one division of the company.
Sustainability Audit
The Telekom Austria Group documents its sustainability performance and provides an annual sustainability report to its stakeholders and the general public. The performance measures follow guidelines offered by the Global Reporting Initiative, thus enabling comparisons to generally accepted indicators of international sustainability reporting. To advance sustainability efforts and management, the company recently implemented a group-wide CSR management system. The goal is to integrate all international subsidiaries into the existing sustainability management and reporting system.
Much is discussed about customer service within the context of sustainability at Telekom Austria. Why is customer satisfaction included in the topic of sustainability?