CellC follows Vodacom’s lead
Prepaid customers who chat for 2 minutes or more receive a 15% reward in the form of a free SMS worth 80c.
The more customers chat the more free SMS’s they can send with 4 minutes earning 2 free SMS’s with a 10 minute call earning 5 free text messages.
Simon Camerer, Cell C’s head of marketing, said “We are very excited to have designed this different, no-wait, no-nonsense rewards programme for our prepaid base. Purely make the call, and the reward is yours. A 6-minute call gives you three free SMSs, worth 80c each – instantly.”
Subscribers accumulate free SMS’s automatically which get credited into their cellphone account each time they make a call of more than two minutes. Cell C will send the subscriber an SMS notification with the number of SMS’s accumulated during the call.
There is no limit to the number of SMS’s a subscriber can accumulate per day. Subscribers are however curbed to five SMS for each call made. SMS’s accumulated and not used within 60 days from day of accumulation will be forfeited.
The EasyChat promotion is just one of the many schemes launched by a cellular company to try and address the heavy criticism that mobile companies have come under lately for their high prices regarding voice data.
Vodacom recently announced a similar points system for prepaid customers where they receive points everytime they load a new voucher. They have also introduced a reduced call rate for Vodacom customers between 5pm and 8pm on weekdays.
The cause of this rush to reduce prices is ICASA’s investigation into the tariffs charged for mobile communication services.
South Africans are becoming more reliant on cellular phones to communicate, with prepaid becoming the option of choice for many customers unable to afford the subsidized contracts.
ICASA is investigating why South Africans are charged higher prices than the international market especially when comparing prepaid prices.
South Africans continue to wait for the results of the ICASA hearings and interestingly enough mobile phone providers are doing very little to target pricing directly. Free SMS promotions and ‘network traffic-reducing’ callmore times are easy to find, but cutting call costs are what is really needed.
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