Wokay!

Spice, the also-ran cellular operator in Karnataka has been trying to rebrand itself over the past few months. It doesn’t have the muscle or subscriber base of an Airtel or a Hutch, so it’s been fighting where it can: innovation in VAS.

I’m not sure how much of a market some of their stuff would have- things like keeping your organiser on a server and accessing it by SMS: the sort of people who would need a calendar regularly could probably afford a PDA anyway. Then, stuff like video ringtones is nothing really differentiated.

When I was out shopping yesterday, though, I noticed something much more interesting: the ‘2gether’ plans. (Links: 99 rupee postpaid, 250 rupee prepaid)

This is a regular potspaid plan. You get to call one other number at discounted rates, which is nothing new. What is new is that they throw in a little bit extra: the two numbers are next to each other. Spice is pitching this as a plan for young couples. The advertising is all big red hearts and cupids.

Again, this might not actually work. I don’t know how many young couples in Bangalore, leave alone the rest of Karnataka would actually want to advertise their relationship status. When Samanth calls up his mother to tell her that his number has changed, so that he can now be one number before Shilpa, sparks will fly.

Leaving that aside, Spice is still on the right track, even if this particular plan might not work. Selling connections to all the people who call each other together is a much better idea than selling to individual customers, who might use it only to receive incoming calls from landlines for all you know. This way, you’re definitely getting most of the call volume for yourself.

In fact, I’m shocked that Airtel or Reliance haven’t come up with something like this for families. Both have their own number series (99 for Airtel and 93 for Reliance) so it’s not like they have a constraint on available adjacent numbers. American cellphone operators have been doing this for years now, and in fact go a little bit extra by putting all the numbers together on one single bill. It’s not as if they have to come up with a completely new model, they just have to imitate whatever Verizon and AT&T are doing. And Airtel is usually quick to pick up whatever works overseas: they saw the Easy Charge system in the Philippines and installed it in India practically overnight.

Hmm. So maybe they’re already doing it. I think the next six months might just see one of the big three private players aggressively marketing adjacent numbers and a unified bill for families. Let’s see.

I got this SMS from Airtel today:

Dear customer, Congrats! In appreciation of your long-standing association,we have actvd ISD facility without any additional deposit, w.e.f 23-Nov-05. Thank you

I wish Airtel wouldn’t use SMS-ese in their offficial messages. It’s irritating. But that aside, I’m thrilled I’ve finally got ISD without having to shell out a deposit. I’m on a peculiar plan- it’s a postpaid plan meant for salaried people, but the Airtel sales office offered it to IIMB students. The problem with that is that to activate long distance calls to landlines, or international calls to any phone, you had to deposit your salary slip. Without a salary slip, you had to deposit ten thousand rupees. Ouch.

Anyway, their customer sercive centre calls me every two months or so and tries to sell me an add-on service. I usually decline, but when the call centre would ask if there’s something I’d rather have instead, I used to tell them how irritating it was not to have an ISD facility. Now, they’ve given it to me just for sticking on for fifteen months.

What is now intriguing me is- did they give this freebie to everyone who’s been on for fifteen months, and has paid bills (very substantial bills indeed at one point of time) promptly? Or, did the customer service rep actually flag the fact that I wanted ISD, enter it into their CRM package, which decided that I would like an ISD facility best when it went through the records and saw that I had been on the same connection for fifteen months. What’s more- is Airtel’s data mining smart enough to figure out that if the bulk of someone’s bill comes from national long distance calls, (s)he might be an even juicier prospect for international long distance?

I’m not too sure. Their Karnataka database was pathetic six months ago- the Airtel centre didn’t know how much I had on deposit, how long I’d had roaming, or how long I’d had my connection. My request to terminate roaming vanished into the ether, and I finally did it myself online when they revamped their website (which now works really well). Still, six months is a long time, and maybe they’ve refined their CRM a lot since then.

Does anybody know if this zero deposit on ISD has been offered to more people than me, or about Airtel’s CRM in general? Comment or drop me a line, please.

Two interesting links. First, MobilePundit links to an Economics Times piece on Bharti and Motorola entering a retail tie-up to sell Motorola handsets. As I mentioned earlier on my old blog, Motorola is selling Bharti the sub-$40 C110 series phones at discounted rates.

Now, Business Standard is reporting that Philips is looking at the bottom of the Indian pyramid, and is trying to gain a lead in mobile phones by coming up with a sub-$20 phone.

I’ll believe a twenty dollar new phone when I see it- there’s a high chance that the Philips CEO is simply putting fart- but the fact that he’s said it it does indicate that there’s going to be competition in this segment. Which is good for consumers, and even better for society in the long run.