Giving it away: Optus’ novel plan to win back customers

Telecommunications provider Optus is deploying a unique approach to winning back customer trust after suffering a data breach and one of the worst outages in the nation’s history: it’s letting anyone try its mobile network for one week for free.

Optus lost thousands of customers as a result of last year’s mass outage, which affected 10 million customers. CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin and other top executives resigned soon after. The telco is now offering a no-commitment trial in a hope that customers will be won over after a week spent testing its network.

The trial represents an open challenge for customers to compare Optus to their current provider, according to the telco’s managing director of customer success Maurice McCarthy.

Optus’ national network went down in November.Credit: Chris Hopkins

“We definitely have been rebuilding the trust across our customer base,” McCarthy said. “We were obviously disappointed with the outage that occurred, and very upset by the cyberattack on Optus, but we’ve been working extremely hard. We’ve had close to a billion dollars of investment into our network and we’ve been very proud of the fact that we’ve been awarded again Australia’s fastest 5G.

“We want to showcase that to people with no commitment or no catches involved.”

The trial launched on Monday and is available through the My Optus app on any eSIM-capable device, which is most smartphones released in the past few years. An eSIM is a digital version of the physical SIM card you put in your phone. Customers can keep their current number and current provider, and use the app to switch between services.

During the trial, customers will have access to 30 gigabytes of data, unlimited standard national calls and 1000 standard national text messages over a seven-day period. The company is not requiring any payment details from customers.

McCarthy said the free trial was the first from an Australian telco, and potentially the first globally.

“To go out with something where you don’t need to put in your credit card details, you just get to try it no questions asked, is clearly unusual. Usually when you try any sort of subscription, whether it’s music streaming or media, there’s always some sort of commitment,” he said.

“People thinking about switching to Optus may be just a little bit nervous about moving across, and this takes away all that stress. And hopefully, they decide they want to continue using the Optus services because they’ve had a great experience.”

Former Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin during a Senate hearing last year. She resigned three days later.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Optus faced widespread frustration from customers and the broader public over last November’s outage, and the company’s main rivals Telstra and TPG picked up market share as a result.

The most recent data from the competition watchdog shows Telstra remains Australia’s dominant mobile player, with a 44 per cent market share. Optus has 31 per cent and TPG is in third place with 17 per cent.

In May, Optus quietly lifted the price of many of its monthly phone plans for the first time in two years. It raised prices by between 5 per cent and 6 per cent, increasing the price of its cheapest postpaid plan from $49 for 30 gigabytes of data to $52 for 50 gigabytes of data.

An Optus spokesman said at the time: “Due to the increasing costs to maintain and provide a great network experience, we’ve made the difficult decision to increase the price of some of our mobile plans.”

Former NBN Co boss Stephen Rue will join Optus as CEO in November, and will hope for a fresh start after the 16-hour outage.

The incident claimed several top Optus executives. Networks boss Lambo Kanagaratnam left the company in March and long-time corporate and public affairs director Sally Oelerich departed in January.

The telco said the outage was the result of a routine software upgrade from its own parent company, Singtel, which took its network offline and forced staff to physically reboot services. The cause of the outage was first revealed by this masthead.

How to change your phone’s mobile network

Customers will need to manually select their mobile network by following the below steps.

For iOS:

1. Go to Settings.

2. Tap Mobile.

3. Tap Mobile Data.

4. Tap the Secondary mobile number. This will only appear after customers have activated their eSIM on the Optus Mobile Network Trial.

5. OPTIONAL: Disable Mobile Data Switching.

For Android:

1. Go to Settings.

2. Tap SIM Management.

3. Tap Preferred SIM for Mobile Data.

4. Use the Secondary mobile number. This will only appear after customers have activated their eSIM on the Optus Mobile Network Trial.

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