For example, AAPT currently offers around 30 different plans in its telephony business -- a figure which could be reduced to just two, according to the company's general manager and chief marketing officer Mark Frederikson.
The ultimate aim of the process is to re-brand AAPT as a telco that is "straight-up" in its dealings with customers, said Frederikson, who is concerned that customers perceive telcos as untrustworthy.
AAPT is also boosting its small to medium enterprise and consumer-focused sales force from just 19 employees to over 200 by the end of this month. The company has already increased its headcount in this area by 100.
"We're opening up the throttles," Frederikson told ZDNet Australia, who admitted that the additional salesforce was being boosted because they had been "going crackerjack".
The initiatives will be backed up by an AU$50 million re-development of AAPT's back-end systems. The project -- which commenced in May -- will rollout in stages, with the first step scheduled to deliver electronic billing functionality in November.
Frederikson said the project would start to deliver benefits -- such as allowing customers to register a change of address or re-configure their business Internet connection online -- by the end of this year.
Internet Telephony
The next generation of telephony is a hot topic at AAPT, which is unsurprising as the company claims to have Australia's largest Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) deployment at its head office in Sydney, which contains over 1,000 staff.
Frederikson said the company's Broadsoft-based hosted VoIP solution, which is targeted at companies with between 35 and 150 seats, is generating an increasing amount of interest.
"All customers are interested in VoIP... We had some early teething problems, but we've got some customers on board now," said Frederikson, who noted that anytime AAPT carried out an advertising campaign mentioning VoIP, "there is a spike in the call centre calls... people ringing in, wanting to talk about VoIP."
However, despite Frederikson's enthusiasm, the company has only signed up about 20 customers with a total of around 1,000 users. The executive said hosted VoIP solutions were mainly attractive to customers that are moving premises or upgrading their existing PABX phone system.
"Not every customer is a prospect all the time," he said, adding that customers with multiple sites were more attracted to the technology due to the prospect of free internal calls between sites.
Internally, the company's VoIP rollout had been successful, Frederikson said, but the more advanced features of the system -- such as its integration with employees' desktop PCs -- were seeing low levels of utilisation by staff.
"There are a hundred thousand features in it," joked Frederikson. "We know that 60 percent of the staff use three features, another 20 percent use five ... but some people still use it as an old fashioned phone."
"A lot of people don't use the full capability," he said, noting AAPT would need to train staff and promote the more advanced features if they were to see wide adoption.
