Optus’ reputation could take three years to recover, says corporate reputation tracker RepTrak

Optus’ reputation has plummeted following a national outage last month, dragging its standing among customers back down to near levels reported after its cyber breach.

Corporate reputation tracker RepTrak says Optus’ reputation last month fell to about 52 out of a score of 100.

Optus’s reputation has dropped by around 12 percentage points following a ­national outage last month, with its score now sitting just above the level it sunk to following a cyber breach last year.

The outage cost chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin her job.

Some of the earliest data following the national outage on November 8, in which more than 10 million customers were taken offline and left unable to send texts or calls, use the internet or in some cases not reach emergency services, shows Australia’s second-largest telco could take several years to recover.

The data, gathered by corporate reputation tracker RepTrak, shows Optus’s reputation last month plummeted to about 52 points out of a score of 100.

That level sits just above the score of 45 points it received in October last year following a cyber breach affecting more than 10 million of its customers.

RepTrak managing director Oliver Freedman said the results were not surprising and showed that the public had been upset by the outage and events that followed. “Seeing that data shows that the community responded quite strongly to the network outage and that change in leadership,” he said.

Asked about the data, an Optus spokeswoman said: “We have apologised to our customers for last month’s outage and are committed to regaining their trust.”

However, regaining that trust would be no easy feat following two incidents in just over 12 months, and could take the telco up to three years to reach pre-breach and pre-outage levels, Mr Freedman said. “This recovery I would think is a three-year process to reach what they were in September 2022,” he said.

In September last year, the company’s reputation score sat at about 68, before it plummeted to 45 in October.

Since January 2021, the highest score it had reached was 70, which it achieved in February, June and November in 2021.

RepTrak monitors about 180 companies, tracking sentiment towards them via online surveys that measure 23 individual criteria including a company’s conduct and leadership, product, the ability to meet customer needs, management, and whether its leader or chief executive is ­appealing to the public.

Optus’ then CEO, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, resigned in the wake of the network’s technical failure. Picture: AAP

Mr Freedman said RepTrak’s data in recent years showed customers wanted to see leaders who could sympathise with them amid a major crisis.

“One of the things I’ve been talking about is that we want our leaders to have authenticity. I think what we saw was that the communities were asking for empathy,” he said.

“It wasn’t just be who you are, they wanted them to show empathy to the experience they were going through.”

Optus’s reputation dropped significantly on the management and strong and appealing leader criteria, Mr Freeman said. The largest drop was the conduct and leadership criteria, while its product was the lowest it had been in the last two to three years.

However, the outage did not have an impact on other telcos, with the reputation of competitors remaining the same or slightly higher throughout November, Mr Freedman said.

The RepTrak data comes after Optus suffered minor outages on Monday night that the company said was due to an issue with shared infrastructure, and a separate issue in Victoria that it said had been resolved in 20 minutes.

Downdetector showed 619 outages were reported by Vodafone users around 6.21pm on Monday, while Optus users reported 252 outages at 7.21pm.

“Optus is aware that some of our mobile customers experienced problems calling customers on another network. We understand that this network has since resolved its issue,” a statement from the company read.

“Separately, we understand that some Optus customers in Victoria had issues with their mobile services earlier this evening, which has been resolved.”

Some of RepTrak’s data showed that on average most companies take two years to recover following a crisis.