Though not the market leaders in the local prepaid telecommunications scene, Globe Telecom continues to offer a series of promos in an effort to grow their prepaid business.
Among them is the GoSakto promo, which recently received the Best Network-based Solution for Serving Customers award at the 19th annual Global Mobile Awards.
The promo basically allows users to create their own prepaid promo by choosing the specific features that they want through a mobile app or USSD menu.
According to Globe Telecom VP for Prepaid Business Issa Cabreira, the promo has allowed them to improve on their prepaid offerings.
“As an organization, just to put it in perspective, we are market leaders in postpaid, that is our heritage, that is how we started our business. However, in the last two years, we’ve actually grown tremendously in the prepaid side of the business, because what we realized is if we are here to serve the nation as a service industry, we do need to cater also to the prepaid market. We’ve actually had a very, very good market share grab for prepaid in the last year,” Cabrera said.
According to Cabrera, the GoSkato promo is contrary to the prepaid behavior, where users register to ala carte promos. However, she said that the promos subscriber base has “exceeded expectations.”
“We thought that prepaid subscribers would only want something that’s ala carte, but what we didn’t realize is, just like any human being, you can never second guess what each person would need, and you can never serve the desire of everybody by offering a single promo…It is so impossible for a certain provider to actually create all those permutations and go to market with it, however this allowed us that,” Cabrera said.
Apart from the basic call and text services, the promo also offers mobile internet, the telco provider’s answer to growing the internet penetration in the country, particularly among the youth.
“Being a communications provider, we don’t just limit the services to basic call and text. Because basic call and text is us being utility. And us actually growing with what the customers need means us servicing and being in step with what they want,” Cabrera said, citing the brand’s recent partnerships with Facebook and Viber as examples.
“We know that the youth today are very much into being online all the time, always being connected, always being in the know. They cannot be offline because they’ll feel that they will be missing out on a lot, and that’s where we actually enable them, that’s where we step in. They have that need. They have that, I guess it’s an emotional need. We need to enable that as a communications company and if we are not able to do that, we’re doing a disservice to these people,” she added.
Growing the mobile internet user base can bring significant changes to the way people communicate, Cabrera said. She explained that with the proliferation of the chat apps and social media networks, people can now communicate in more heavily-visual ways.
“It’s also us changing the landscape of communication, so from just plain black and white, so to speak, flat, one-dimensional communication, we enable all our subscribers especially the youth to actually have a richer way of communicating, connecting, and expressing themselves,” she said.
