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.

“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.