COMMERCIAL OPERATIONS

Innovation has been MTC's strategic core for many years (e.g. one of the first prepaid and 4th HSDPA technologies in Africa) and today it is a defining element in MTC's DNA. According to the annual Customer Value Management Programme which was developed by the reputed international entity called Synovate – Research Reinvented, MTC reached a score of 81% (according to the methodology the ideal is 83%) where network, price perception and service quality were the three main parts of the pyramid that was shown by the survey results for 2011.

During the reviewed year, MTC developed several commercial packages for prepaid and postpaid customers to suit the specific needs of every micro segment. The introduction of BlackBerry® in February was a tremendous success, not only in the postpaid market but also for prepaid customers. Although RIM® (the company of BlackBerry®) does not allow the disclosure of our number of active subscribers, we however were surprised by the high demand for these services. Most customers prefer the Connect SmartPhone package that cost N$399 per month and offers 600 minutes, 300 SMSs and 600 MB for movies per month. The BlackBerry® service in these postpaid packages are included and gives the user the freedom of e-mail usage and internet browsing, excluding video.

On the prepaid side, we built on the incredible success of Aweh- Aweh launched last year with a new champion, namely T49, added in 2011. This strengthened the wide offering to answer different demands, which was the result of our efforts in terms of developing new approaches. T49 allows customers to call to any network for only 38c per minute all day, every day. Plus, the customer gets 100 free SMSs per day after the first SMS is charged at the normal rate.

On the data side, the core focus of MTC's commercial department was to enlarge the packages in the NetMan range. The most successful package was NetMan unlimited, at the cost of N$949. Currently, MTC has more than one thousand customers in this high-end package range and generates (download and upload) on average more than 50GB per month. The second most successful product was the NetMan data bundle, with packages ranging from 50MB for N$25 up to 5GB for N$999.

At arms reach of desire

The main objective in all commercial activities is to provide better and faster service to every MTC customer. In order to follow that aim, a second MobileHome was opened in Oshakati and we have expanded the size of the Katutura MobileHome, enabling us to provide better service to this important segment of our market. This brings the MobileHomes armada total to 27, countrywide. The second important contribution to the armada is to assist our contract customers to pay their bills more easily. Aiming to improve availability and a faster service, MTC completed the first step of a new application that transfers the payments received from our Pop-dealers (42 stores countrywide where contract bills can be paid) to MTC without any physical transaction. The second step is to complete the connection directly from the Pop-dealers to our billing system, which will be completed end of March 2012. The third development accomplished in the year reviewed is an improvement at our repair centre, whereby the customerr is accurately informed of where his/her cellphone is. The new system keeps track throughout the entire repair process, from the moment that the customer delivers the device until it is fixed and returned again. During the repair process the customer receives an SMS during different stages, until the final request is sent to collect the device from the place specified by the client.

Performance expectation

During the year MTC decided to deploy a CRM platform that manages all contract interactions with customers, being either a new contract application or the renewal of a contract. With the new CRM tool, all requests will be managed in an automatic pool and visualised in daily reports indicating which customer is on hold and who is attending to their request. In the end, we improve this very important area by monitoring the performance delivery on each request.

At the Call Centre, we have reached the point where we receive more than 800,000 calls per month from prepaid customers through the IVR (interacting voice response) of which more than 450,000 customers request to be transferred to agents in three different languages. Postpaid customers talk directly to the agents and those calls add up to 75,000 per month. The majority of our prepaid customers that are calling our Call Centre (close to 50% of the calls) are to request settings to enable cell phones to connect to the Internet. In order to answer the tremendous demand of those requests, MTC chose the most advanced system to automatically configure the mentioned settings. The new system will be implemented during the first quarter of next year.