Winds of change for Maxis has arrived

He came, conquered and ruled the prepaid telco industry, and then left a legacy of bold strategies for all to emulate. Most thought he exited the market for good. However, Morten Lundal, now the current CEO of Maxis Berhad, has always been the sort to pull out a big surprise from his proverbial magician’s hat. Yes, he has returned and is now helming the telco that once considered him a bitter pill that is hard to swallow.

This new twist had many wondering what his plans are. Thus, PC.com thought it is appropriate to catch up with Lundal after a year of his arrival at Maxis. We caught the far-thinking and insightful leader during a slow day at Maxis Tower to learn of his journey thus far.
PC.com: Let’s start with reminiscing on this adventure you are now in. Just over a year in, and after the huge fanfare about your return to KL, how has the transformational journey been for you personally and for Maxis? 

Morten Lundal: For the last five years, I had been based in Vodafone, where I manage its entire commercial portfolio – from handsets to the stores, customer service, and enterprise solutions.
That opportunity had been as beneficial for me as my time in Malaysia had been before that. Everything I have done and all the people I met within the industry is truly a real privilege for me. All this is made sweeter as I’ve seen first-hand how the communications industry operates in different country settings and learnt how advanced telcos and service providers position themselves in this space. When I came to Malaysia last year, I initially assumed I had been going back into an emerging market – a straightforward transition from London. Thankfully, my perception quickly changed as Malaysia proves itself to be a very advanced market.

I say this because Malaysia has a very high smartphone penetration and an equally as significant broadband usage rate. Users here are also very adept when it comes to using apps and can be seen as nearly comparable with Europe. I definitely didn’t expect that! In some sense – mobile technology can be considered as very ahead for this country with usage patterns being similar to more mature markets. This is what I observed over the 12 months since I’ve returned.
What hasn’t happened here yet is the upsurge for e-commerce. Thus far, this phenomenon here hasn’t reach critical mass yet. While major label stores are closing down in the west, most in this region are still operating. In fact, I noticed many local businesses are fairly old fashioned in how they perceive the world while their customers are the ones encountering more advanced e-commerce experiences. Indeed, mobility has enabled the latter to be savvier now as young consumers – the primary user of mobile apps, are leading this transformative trend.

It’s interesting that we need not focus on broadening these enablers any longer with mobility and broadband. What we as telcos need to do now is to use the tech we propagate and manage to empower users and businesses differently. This is how it’s transformational for me as there is just so much to do. Truly, I’m excited about coming back here…coming home to do all this.

PC.com: It’s good that you think that Malaysia is home.

Lundal: Well, it does feel like I’m coming home because it’s been a very easy transition when I returned to Malaysia. Of course when I joined Maxis though, a few things – for me – has to change. This, I feel, is part of my personal journey. It’s not just Maxis that needs this as companies in general, like Vodafone, still operate with age-old channels like call centres and brick/mortar retail points. With everything now being in a post-change era, thanks to mobility, I expect all these to all evolve.

For Maxis, the brand will eventually become an app. As is, I don’t view it as a company that deals with phone numbers, channels, or call centres. In essence, it will become an app as most are now accessing our services through their mobile devices or via the PC. We are no longer based in an traditional non-online service platform. You’ve seen how apps have changed the taxi industry. Thus, I would like to change Maxis into a digital showcase and be the most digitally empowered company in Malaysia.

PC.com: That is an interesting take! How would you go about this? 

Lundal: I plan to take some extreme propositions in order to make people think differently. In fact, I had been telling my management people here – basically the Top 30, that we should close our website in three years. Why?! Because our business and brand should all be on an app.

We have the power and unique position where all our customers, per definition, use smartphones. Why do we even have a website? I wouldn’t mind being in the first company in the world to close its website. Well, probably not entirely close it down but have it morphed into something else. The key interaction with our company should be through an app. Many still go to retail centres for the paperwork or be engaged with new services. Just as many call these places and have to interact with various legacy-based automated assistance systems. Being an app replaces every one of these processes.

I think in two to three years from now, our prepaid and postpaid apps will move from a niche space to be more mainstream. This is the plan I have for Maxis as we move into the dedicated app space. Think about it, Facebook is an app and so is Google and Amazon. Even Uber is an app. Thus, it isn’t the company customers are dealing with as they move to associate the brand via services. Where Maxis is still a retail store and call centre for many, I want it to eventually be associated to our app. That means digitising all our stores.

Of course, that’s not the only way as we also use social media to engage our customers. Moving into this direction is very important as more and more of our calls and visits in retail are shifting towards Twitter and Facebook. That’s a good thing. When one person asks a question and it gets responded, everybody can see the answer. It’s now a one to million engagement. This change I plan to bring forth will affect the frontline and the back-end on so many levels.

For me, this is an exciting time as we are moving from a decade of selling enablers, phones, connections, and everything in between, to leveraging what we have put in place to change lives and companies. It’s hard work but when you think about it, all this is about challenging the way we operate.

It’s so easy for management, not just top management, to be removed from both employees and customers. Personally, I want my team to be super focused on staying grounded and close to our customers and employees. We learn every day, taking every anecdote seriously.  The management shouldn’t hide and the walls that hide these people should come down. What we have erected over the years is not respect of privacy but a real disconnect from our employees. That is something that shouldn’t be there in the first place.

PC.com: How does this translate to the end user out there?  Even now, we still get phone calls coming to our office from some of your subscribers who complain about bad coverage and dropped calls. There are even remarks on your Facebook page on the same issues.  

Lundal: We’re not doing this stuff internally only. Change is all-encompassing and is part of the vision that we have recently introduced to create the unmatched customer experience for the Maxis ecosystem. Our goal is to be unparalleled versus all other players. That’s why we do the work to ensure all these changes will positively impact on how Maxis operates. But are we in the right transition towards providing unmatched customer experiences today?

Perhaps, though I can say we’re doing a lot to get there. After all, we have to be the best in what we do. Indeed, it is as simple as that and we are investing a lot to make this happen. As is, we already have a lot of fundaments in the industry, like the fiberized network backbone, having built a whole new network for 70% of our customers, and putting into place all sorts of hardware, services, and training to ensure they all experience top international quality performance.

So when it comes to the speed of data and dropped calls, I’d say we are ahead of the rest in managing these issues better. We’re world class already in what we do and everyone can expect our whole network to be ramped up by next year. Of course, top class doesn’t mean it is perfect.

How so? Why do we still have dropped calls? This problem has a few painful driving factors. Mostly, it is when people stealing the fibre – thinking it is copper, our engineers will then have to spend hours repairing the fault. That means having downtime for the site and creating problems like drop calls. Also, there is still coverage gaps in our network as it cannot be 100% up all the time. We even get a lot of radio interference from Indonesia, a pain point we cannot influence as it affects the whole industry. Then there are issues like tinted windows, which most wireless signals cannot breach, and occasional power outages. The last two are outside of our control as well.

PC.com: Your peers, both within Maxis and in your competitors, have shared that customer engagement, proliferation of devices, converged platforms which creates the always connected customer are key trends. Would you agree with that or do you have anything broader to share? 

Lundal: Well, we all see the same trends and all these things are true and have been the case for a while. In fact, the Internet of Things has been promised for the last 10 years so, really, this isn’t a new trend. The only difference is they are now probably becoming realer by the day. It won’t proliferate so quickly in the next year or two in volume but perhaps over the next five years when things are fully connected, be it cameras or cars or fridge or whatever it is, then it would accelerate.

E-commerce, on the other hand, is happening now thanks to e-payment. In the coming months, we will probably see the climate of m-commerce commodities rise in scale. While Apple, once again, is the one to properly kickstart mass adoption, I think the idea itself is maturing among other vendors. Thus, enterprises and governments will have to work differently as young people will start demanding to have more advanced technological infrastructure to properly use such services.

PC.com: What do you see Maxis being within the next five years? Are you still going to be an operator or be something even more? 

Lundal: I think we, as mobile operators, have been losing our sleep at night too much as we consider this question. For 25 years, we have been connecting people to our services and now we connect people to the Internet. Yet another worry to ponder on: What’s next? A lot of companies will have that naivety and cheek to create very ambitious digital divisions that continue the fight for customer affection. As such, we have to find our place in this vast ocean of data and while it may sound unsexy and a bit boring, I believe we just have to be the best Internet enablers out there – period.

That means providing fantastic connectivity and making it overtly ubiquitous to fit our ever-changing mobile and fixed lifestyles.

PC.com: Would you consider content as king as opposed to using smart devices. Because people say growth for telco industry and the IT sector as a whole is based on devices. Others say the same for content as well. Where do you stand? 

Lundal: In terms of user experience, it’s all about content. When it comes to the growth of the industry, such demands will drive the content industry forward as well as challenge established practices within that sector. The end result will, of course, be proliferation. Is content important? Yes it is. However, content creation is not for us as I don’t think we will have a role in creating content.  I think it is naive of these mobile companies to think that “we are going to create content, we are going to create apps”.

PC.com: You’ve been known to be a market challenger and a game changer. Are we going to expect more of the same in your capacity as the new CEO of Maxis?  

Lundal: Such strategies have a certain time and place. Those days do not have a lot of rules in the industry that needed changing. In some ways, all industries are expected to progress when they make changes happen or when it matures. It certainly goes beyond more than pricing and branding games. While that is still in practice, their priorities have changed and serve less importance. Now is really more about changing the customer experience. The contribution I hope to this is to leave Maxis as an extremely digitally empowered company – from its customers, to the employees, and partners who are present in the Maxis ecosystem. In fact, I would change the way we engage all our stakeholders. That will be my focus – to drive more on customer experience at all levels, even by the way of employee experience.

It’s my fervent hope that there will be great pride in using Maxis because of the ease of interaction and power of the services we offer.