Phone users lose N730bn annually

mobile phones

 Mobile phone users in Nigeria lose a minimum of N730 billion annually due to poor quality of service from mobile operators.
 The loss is mainly due to dropped call rates and charges for undelivered shot message  services (SMS) deducted from subscribes accounts.Deolu Ogunbanjo, President of National Association of Telecommunication subscribes(NATCOMS), who relayed the figure, said the loss has been a reoccurring decimal for several years.
The research also disclosed that mobile money would gather more steam because it easily provides a compelling solution to the challenges of financial inclusion; illiteracy and a lack of awareness, a cumbersome documentation process and difficulty in proving identity or proof of address, long distances and often awkward physical access to bank branches particularly in rural and isolated locations, low income and high transaction costs. 
It argued that the market would be a customer-centric space as against the ‘operator centric’ scenario that held sway for a while. 


On using freebies to attract attention of customers, the research warned telecommunications operators to begin to understand the value perception range of the Nigerian customer segments. “There have been shifts and operator strategies must be around Value Maximization for each of the target segment: Provide value as defined by the identified segment and at a profitable price tag. 
“Services and products must now be delivered within the context of consumers’ realities and idiosyncrasies. Operators must explore behavioural analytics which utilizes user’s mobile concierge of choice, simple behavioural analytics (demographics and behaviour) and contextual data (location, time) to offer users specific content and services that they are most likely to value from the long tail of available services”. 
The Tnsrms report stressed that aggressive competition may weaken prices and for some individual operators, it may not be optimal to offer further price reductions. Moreso, the high level of price based competition in the market is partly a reflection of a lack of non-price differentiation”
Looking ahead, it said, digital natives for whom technology is second future would shape the future of the Nigerian telecommunications space: facing this digital multimedia world is a challenge and opportunity. 
According to the company, the Nigerian market is extremely youthful with over 80 per cent of Nigerians less than 40 years old and 41 per cent of the population less than 14 years old. 
Nigeria is currently the largest online community in Africa with well over 60 million persons accessing the Internet. 
It therefore said that in order to future-proof their businesses, operators in Nigeria must aggressively pursue the provision of a complete host of multimedia and ICT products and services solutions to all their customers: online commerce, educational services, cloud services, mobile money, mobile advertising, gamification drive, own OTT offers, entertainment + sports services etc. It recognized that some operators are already looking in this direction.
On the regulatory side, it recalled that the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), has announced its plans to auction the remaining slots in the 2.3GHz spectrum – aimed at unbundling the nation’s broadband infrastructure, which it believed will boost the provision of internet access. 
“In addition, there is also the proposed licensing of infrastructure companies to hasten the deployment of broadband to all nooks and crannies of the country under the national broadband network deployment plan”, it added.