Elias Biryabarema
3 October 2008
MTN Uganda has made MTN Zone, the telecom giant's novel tariff discount offering that has been running on a promotional basis since July this year, a permanent option in their range of call tariff lines.
The development now makes the company have some of the cheapest calls in the industry and is expected to provoke a response from its principal competitors. In the two months since the MTN Zone call discount service has been running more than 2 million people have signed up for the tariff offer and the company has previously described it as the most successful product ever launched.
"The number of customers who have signed on to MTN's innovative tariff structure, MTN Zone, has now hit two million, one of the broadest product uptakes in the ICT industry, barely three months after the introduction of the offer in Uganda," said MTN Chief Commercial Officer, Mr Eric van Veen at a press conference on 1st October.
According to MTN's own calculation, the average discount during the day now stands at 40 per cent, and it rises to 80 per cent in the evening hours. "In addition, there has been a 70 per cent increase in call usage since MTN Zone was launched compared to pre-Zone period" said van Veen.
Customers who migrate to MTN Zone benefit from tariff discounts tied to when and where they make their calls. Those discounts can range from 10 per cent to as high as 99 per cent (if a call is made at a location with little call traffic or at extreme off-peak time mostly beyond midnight).
With an average discount of 40 per cent, a call of one minute duration in some areas and certain times costs Shs288 down from Shs420, a saving of Shs132 per minute.
Although major telecoms have lately found many other ways of strengthening their competitive edge over their rivals, like introducing a string of value added services, the most effective strategy of retaining and growing one's customer base still remains offering the lowest call costs. Zain for instance is currently touting its Chacha tariff structure where it charges its customers Shs 3 per second across all networks.
Warid has also been running a tariff discount offer dubbed Mega bonus where its customers were entitled to a day of free calls for every airtime voucher purchased.
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