(AFP Photo)
There are now over 95 million mobile phone users in Egypt, and the market is now saturated, which has pushed competition between the mobile operator companies, Vodafone, Mobinil, and Etisalat, to attract new clients. The companies offered untraditional value-added services, which may contribute to attracting new clients from the competitors.
Etisalat Egypt tried to offer many value-added services to its clients through its “Choose Your Gift” programme, which allows the client to choose their gift once they charge their account with more than EGP 15 in credit. This encourages clients to interact more with the network. The company also offered a new service that allows clients to buy online through the official company website. Delivery is free of charge, in order for the company to enter the e-commerce activity.
Etisalat Egypt also offered its clients the chance to pay online through a virtual credit card called Flous, in partnership with MasterCard.
Vodafone, on the other hand, offered online shopping through its official website, and payment is after delivery. However, the company offered what the other two did not through the “Ana Vodafone” service, which is an application for smart phones. The application allows the user to follow up on their monthly receipt and details of the calls, manage Internet services on the phone, activate the block service, selecting the white-list of callers, and a service that provides the nearest branch.
Lastly, Mobinil is offering a variety of value-added services to its clients. Some services are through the Internet, and others are free minutes and additional speed for phone Internet. The most significant service is “Mobinil Drive”, which gives its clients 5GB to store images, numbers, and files on their computers.
Mobinil also offered “Pay For My Community” service, through which the client can select a list of numbers they can pay the call for, so that the call cost would be automatically deducted from this client.
