Safaricom customers who delay paying their calls and SMS credit advance through the Okoa Jahazi service will now have the amounts automatically settled by debiting their loyalty points.
The move is designed to address defaults while also reducing the value of billions of shillings’ worth of outstanding Bonga points which are a liability to the telco.
Customers can request a credit advance, which they are required to settle within five days. An advance-fee of 10 percent is charged for each Okoa Jahazi request, resulting in a customer receiving 90 percent of the credit advance.
“Dear customer, we have deducted 2,500 Bonga points for Sh750 to repay your Okoa loan,” reads a message to a Safaricom customer which places the value of each point at 30 cents.
Okoa Jahazi enables customers to keep communicating when their normal resources are depleted, with the subscribers expected to settle the debt within the set timeframe or face a ban from accessing the credit advance.
Each Safaricom subscriber earns loyalty points when using the telephony services, resulting in substantial resources which the telco is now tapping to settle unpaid Okoa Jahazi debt.
The new development comes less than three months since Safaricom reversed a plan to put an expiry date on its Bonga loyalty programme that had amassed Sh4.5 billion in liabilities by March 2022, which would have seen customers lose points accrued before 2019.
The latest position by the firm is against a November 2022 update of the programme’s terms and conditions that would have seen unclaimed points expire effective January 1, 2023.
Safaricom had termed the move to expire the unused Bonga Points as a business decision aimed to incentivise redemption with liabilities hitting Sh4.5 billion end of March 2022.
The telco began the loyalty programme in October 2017, giving both prepaid and postpaid subscribers a point for every Sh10 spent on its network.
The Bonga Points can be redeemed for rewards including talk-time (minutes), data bundles, and messaging bundles.
For instance, 50 Bonga Points earns a customer four minutes of talk time with a validity of seven days. Six hundred points give 3,500 SMSs valid for 30 days.
In addition to data, minutes and SMS, the points are usually redeemable for merchandise at select retail outlets while using Lipa na M-Pesa service.
The telco has also restricted the time within which customers can use up data resources bought through the use of its Bonga loyalty points.
Bonga data bundles that were previously marked as having no expiry are now carrying a validity of seven days, as per terms and conditions published by the telco.
Data redemptions on the telco’s Bonga points USSD platform in the meantime are indicating that Bonga data purchases, which range from 80 MB to one gigabyte, expire effective midnight on the day of the purchase.
