Local mobile firms fail to meet global benchmarks

Two months ago, another telecom market research done for Zain by Millward Brown, found that Telkom Kenya had the highest customer satisfaction levels, followed by Zain and Safaricom respectively.

This is the fist time that an evaluation of the mobile players’ services is being made public.

Although the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) has its own research and evaluation team and therefore has an official position regarding the quality of mobile services it has thus far not shared its findings with the public, citing gag laws.

According to CCK officials who spoke to Business Daily, the institution plans to announce an amendment to this law by January next year through a gazette notice which will then allow it to go public with such information.

CCK then plans to circulate regular reviews of the telecoms industry’s products and the quality of their services in the media.

Consumers are the biggest beneficiaries of this new free flow of information about the quality of mobile services although the analysis is aimed at providing information to the government and industry players for purposes of measuring compliance to set standards and to assist them improve as needed.

Reliable information

End users who have been operating in the dark for over a decade will now have reliable information at their disposal provided by both the government and independent firms.

Hitherto the only source of information available to end users has been provide by the mobile operators themselves.

A user can now evaluate various aspects of the call services provided by mobile operators and make informed decisions.

In addition, a potential subscriber can make a projection of the quality of services he can he or she can expect from a particular company based on an assessment of the correlation between subscriber build up and frequency of infrastructure upgrades.

This will be especially important in the future as quality of service is expected to increasingly carry more weight in mobile operators’ subscriber retention strategies than price which has hitherto been a key determinant of customer retention.

“We welcome this noble step by independent players in the industry to measure customer experience.

Through such initiatives, we are optimistic competition in the industry will soon be based on quality of service, not price,” Mr Rene Meza, Zain’s chief executive said in an earlier interview.

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