Bangkok--Dec 16--DTAC
Happy announces plans to introduce new campaigns under ‘Dee Jai’ (Delight) concept to please both distributors and customers early next year.
Happy, DTAC’s prepaid mobile phone service, has successfully maintained its 30% share of the market while seeing its third-quarter revenues rose by 53% compared to the same corresponding period last year, according to DTAC’s Prepaid Business Unit Director Thana Thienachariya.
Happy has this year introduced two major marketing concepts ‘Por Dee’ (Just right) and ‘Jai Dee’ (Kindness). Under the ‘Por Dee’ concept, Happy kicked off ‘Baby SIM’ and Bt50 refill card, the first prepaid products targeting at light-usage segment. During the second half of the year, Happy launched ‘Happy Go Inter’ service under the ‘Jai Dee’ concept.
Although the innovations have successfully fueled the market growth by forcing other operators to come up with similar services, Thana admits that the initiatives have also brought about new challenges such as higher-than-expected number of subscribers and price-control problem.
“The situation will be tougher in 2005 when over 80% of new subscribers will be those migrating from other networks. All operators will compete on relatively same network and service standard while focus will be mainly on mass market with fewer innovations coming into the market. Happy’s 2005 strategy will continue to concentrate on strengthening its ‘Jai Dee’ image with plans to introduce two new campaigns under new marketing concept ‘Dee Jai’ (Delight) by the first quarter of next year. The new campaigns aim to give our distributors and customers an even more delightful experience with the first one focusing on distribution system and the other on CRM system. We will also keep working closely with existing partners such as Netle, Sahapat, Giffarine, AEON, SFX, KTC and SCB while looking for new opportunities to further expand our partnership with other businesses next year,” says Thana.
DTAC’s Sales and Distribution Group Director Sirichai Larbmahanond adds that Happy has initiated the ‘Happy Salesmen’ project by deploying the Sales Tracking System (STS) over a budget of 50 million baht to enhance its sales and distribution competency. The installation took six months to complete and the system has already been up and running since the beginning of this month. Next year, Happy will reduce the number of wholesalers from 150-200 to 60 and appoint them its authorized distributors instead. The distributors will be responsible for the performance of retail outlets in their respective areas. To keep track of inventories and sales performance, all sales associates will be required to enter ID numbers and item barcodes into the system whenever sales and merchandizing activities taking place. In addition, Happy will be equipped with a larger troop of cash vans to extend its reach to remote areas and to bridge up communication gap with provincial distributors.
DTAC’s Prepaid Activation Group Director Ketchayong Skowratananont further explains that the Sales Tracking System is developed by combining consumer product approach with telecom technology together to bring telecom distribution management to the next level. The system will keep Happy informed of daily sales activities at all levels from large distributors to sub-dealers and mobile kiosks. Information collected by the system will also help shape up appropriate incentive schemes for the distributors. Each distributor will be authorized to disseminate the company’s information and manage responsible retail outlets’ performances to be line with Happy’s requirements. It’s been hoped that the restructuring will solve the problems of price competition and sales area overlapping among the distributors. It will also help deliver greater productivity and profitability for all parties involved while allowing the customers to have an access to the same standardized services across the country.
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