What’s happening?

As you know fibre cancellations are a challenge for the entire industry and cancellation rates vary across service providers.  In the first six months of 2019, 23% of submitted orders were cancelled. We believe that there is an opportunity to significantly reduce cancellations for the benefit of everyone.

In March, we initiated a fibre cancellations review via the product forum. We presented a further paper to April’s product forum that focused on current trends and provided some further insights into reducing the cost and impact of cancellations. 

Cancellation policy

From 1 November 2019, a cancellation policy will be introduced based on our NGA Operations Manual [see below], whereby Chorus will apply a fee of up to $170 for each cancellation where a technician was already dispatched.

The fee is further detailed in Section 9.13 of the Bitstream Operations Manual from June 2018:

Updating Service Requests and Service Orders

9.13 A Service Request or Service Order may be cancelled at any time before the Service Start Date. In respect of any such cancellation:

(i) for a new Connection or plan change involving a site visit, where a Service Order is cancelled on the first or second Business Day after receipt of a Service Request, and no charge shall apply;

(ii) for a new Connection or plan change involving a site visit, where a Service Order is cancelled later than 2 Business Days after receipt of a Service Request for Residential and Business Connections, if the LFC has incurred Field Technician cost prior to the change requested then the LFC may charge the Service Provider for 2 hours’ time in accordance with the hourly rates set out at Item 1.14 of Table A in Appendix 3 of the Price List for Field Technician;

(iii) for a new Connection or plan change involving a site visit, where a Service Order is cancelled later than 2 Business Days after receipt of a Service Request for an NBAP Connection, the LFC may charge the Service Provider for costs it has incurred in processing the Service Request, in accordance with the time and materials rates set out at Item 1.14 of Table A in Appendix 3 of the Price List for Field Technician; and

(iv) there is no charge for the cancellation by a Service Provider of a Service Order for a plan change that doesn’t involve a site visit, or where the cancellation is advised to the LFC within 2 Business Day.

Minimising cancellation rates

We know that there are many factors that drive cancellations, and while some of these sit with Chorus, there are also opportunities for you to drive lower cancellation rates. Some examples of these are landlord permission, premises not ready and access denied. We are looking forward to work together with you to address these and other controllable areas to minimise cancellations rates.

Completed initiatives

Since March, we’ve completed the following actions based on the feedback that you provided to us:

• We have created a cancellation dashboard to provide you with a more transparent view on cancellations and your performance on a monthly basis. It’s available through your account team.  
• We took action on feedback with issues circulating around landlord approvals and have made a submission to the Tenancy Amendment Act  in support for a change to allow tenants to make minor modifications to rentals.
• We’ve also worked hard on sourcing landlord approvals for Housing New Zealand tenants and have been able to gain agreement for a stream line process, which we will inform you in more detail shortly.

Next steps

We look forward to working together with you to further address other controllable areas to minimise cancellations rates and maximise use of installation resource for a sustainable outcome and an improved sales to activation/conversion rate. As part of this process we would also like to discuss with you the practical application of the cancellation policy.

Your account team will be contacting you to organise a workshop session as early as possible.