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Vodacom Lesotho Offers Hourly and Daily Deals

Vodacom Lesotho Offers Hourly and Daily Deals

Vodacom Lesotho has launched the Vodacom ticket, a new offer tailored to suit individual internet usage, according to a report. The ticket, which comes in different bundles for different social media, will include categories such as video, social, music and sports, for the duration of the ongoing Russia 2018 World Cup soccer competition.

Vodacom’s Marketing and Brand Manager, Mpho Brown, said the Vodacom ticket can be used across a range of applications for a specified amount of time. With discounted rates, customers can choose to purchase tickets that are valid for an hour or a day. The company is considering expanding the offer to include weekly and monthly packages, depending on the level of interest.

Brown added that customers can choose from any of the available categories. Brown said for social media, the ticket gives customers affordable access to platforms including WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram, at either hourly or daily rates.

Tarifica’s Take

This initiative from Vodacom draws on two principles simultaneously—providing customers with increased flexibility and using a short-term promotion to determine how to proceed with a new offer.

All across markets globally, consumers are demanding—and often receiving—options that ensure that they will have more ability than ever before to match their pricing to their their usage patterns. And since those patterns may not be steady-state but vary at differing intervals, choosing to pay for data on a weekly, daily or even hourly basis rather than monthly is the most satisfactory arrangement for many customers. And this sensitivity to time periods is exactly what Vodacom is offering subscribers in Lesotho. The concept of a voucher than can be spent in various ways is certainly not new, but calling it a ticket is a good way to make it easier for subscribers to understand or visualize it.

Furthermore, many users consume the vast majority of their data allowances on particular social media apps and sites. By targeting discounted data bundles to such services, operators can keep data prices as low as possible and avoid bill shock, thus appealing to customers and helping with customer retention and even acquisition. Vodacom Customer Business Unit Executive Head Tsepo Thabisi said, “Our customers can engage in the things they love the most, without the fear of spending more than they wanted to.” He added that the flexibility of the Vodacom ticket ensures that customers will not have to worry about spending limits for any one particular app or about having their data allowances depleted by other applications or by system updates.

Offering the ticket on a trial basis during a limited period of time makes sense in terms of gauging customer response, so that the operator can determine if it is worth continuing and, indeed, expanding to include weekly and monthly social-media targeted offers. Making the World Cup (or at least the final part of it; the event ends on 15 July) the promotional period is not strictly necessary, but it will at least permit Vodacom to assess the interest level in the sports category. Other than that, using the World Cup to determine usage preferences and interest level may not actually be the best idea, given that Lesotho football fans may be unusually active on social media during that time—a pattern that may not reflect their usage habits in general.