Around October every year, I brace myself in anticipation of the next six months; it is this period that traditionally brings seasonal weather such as bushfires, wild storms and even hurricanes. All of these can wreak havoc on our services.

As GMD of Telstra Services I am responsible for the delivery of telecommunications right across Australia. To say we’ve been busy this year is an understatement.

Widespread flooding in Queensland, storms in New South Wales and sub-hurricane winds in Melbourne just last week caused tremendous damage to homes and infrastructure, including Telstra’s. To help get customers back on the air, we go where we’re needed and over the last six months over 1200 technicians have been mobilised away from their normal place of work.

For example, one of our technicians from Western Australia has been working interstate for around three months and has only returned to his home base for about three days during that time. He has worked in three different states and worked through the Christmas, New Year and the Australia Day holiday periods.

We deal in big numbers - thousands of calls, customer contacts, and tickets of work every day - and our experience in handling high volumes shows in times of crisis. Consider for example, some of our capacity in just 30 minutes: we will receive around 1000 calls from customers enquiring about their service; complete around 500 activations; our technicians will visit over 500 customers and by the end of the day will have driven over 220,000 kilometres nationally and completed around 23,000 tickets of work.

Today, and every other day, we will meet around 95 per cent of all of our customer commitments nationally, getting the job done at the time our customers agreed to. To me that’s the most important number of them all - and we're always trying to get better.