Etisalat Nigeria recently entered into a strategic partnership with Vodacom Business Nigeria that promises improved mobile voice and data services and enterprise solutions to its customers. In this interview, Eric Uwaoma, Director, Enterprise Segment, Etisalat Nigeria spoke about key focuses of the agreement. Excerpts…
What is the Etisalat/Vodacom partnership about?
The partnership between Etisalat Nigeria and Vodacom Business Nigeria is a synergy that enables both Etisalat and Vodacom to take advantage of each other’s strengths in the market to present a richer and more compelling offer to their customers.
It will enable Vodacom to provide mobile voice and data services to its customers riding on Etisalat’s reliable mobile infrastructure and also enable Etisalat to provide improved enterprise solutions to its customers leveraging on Vodacom’s unique bouquet of services on its fixed network.
The Etisalat Vodacom partnership is a symbiotic relationship whereby both companies collaborate on the use of each other’s fixed and mobile service solutions, network technology and infrastructure to provide unique enterprise solutions and mobile voice and data services to customers.
What are the objectives of the Etisalat/Vodacom partnership?
The main objectives are to give Etisalat and Vodacom’s business customers a more robust bouquet of services on mobile voice, data and Enterprise solutions, to add value to Etisalat and Vodacom’s customers by collaborating in the area of solution development for the benefit of customers.
It will also provide one-stop Enterprise solution to customers of Etisalat and Vodacom and provide better customer experience for customers by improving efficiency leveraging on the strengths of both companies.
What are the benefits of this partnership to customers?
This partnership will enable us provide point to point and point to multi point connectivity solutions to customers, especially the corporate customers, mid-size businesses and multinationals, thereby offering them a one-stop shopping experience. This means that business customers no longer have to shop for telecom solutions from multiple service providers and deal with the challenges associated with managing numerous vendors.
The Etisalat/Vodacom partnership enables customers consolidate their services in one service provider; this gives business customers the opportunity to benefit from bulk buying thereby reducing costs.
Improve productivity and response time for corporates, especially those businesses with large number of staff on the move and gather better customer insight in order to be equipped to develop better customised, fit-for-purpose solutions based on customer’s unique needs.
The partnership gives Etisalat and Vodacom customers’ access to better and specialised skills with wider foot presence to drive quicker on-site support and consequently improve service response time.
With this synergy, large cooperates in Nigeria would now have access to high performance, easy to manage mobile communication solutions for their businesses.
Vodacom and Etisalat customers will be provided with a single billing platform; this eliminates the inconvenience of dealing with multiple service providers.
What new products and services will be available to Etisalat customers as a result of this partnership?
Etisalat customers will now have additional unique and enhanced voice offers, like the Classic postpaid package, a premium contract package with versatile functional features like real time credit limit management, dual account profile that separates individual usage from official usage, account balance enquiry, etc. The classic postpaid also has features like the Closed User Group that enables employees of a company call each other for free subject to a monthly subscription fee; and the white list/black feature which is also very useful for busy executives who wish to manage calls to their lines during busy schedules.
Vodacom customers on the other hand will have access to Etisalat’s fast, premium mobile internet packages, rated the best mobile broadband internet service in the industry. Vodacom customers will in addition be able to access offers such as Etisalat data share package which offers a cost effective bucket of data, from which numerous users within an organisation can centrally consume data from. Vodacom Customers will also have access to Etisalat’s multiple easyblaze postpaid data plans which is available in more than 212 cities across Nigeria.
Are there value propositions for Etisalat and Vodacom customers?
This partnership will provide Etisalat customers numerous value propositions such as the Machine to Machine (M2M) connectivity packages which aid POS transactions, intelligent metering, fleet management, surveillance services and cloud solutions to mention a few. Now customers can be sure of seamless fixed Connectivity services, Point to Point and Point to Multiple Point services and secured connectivity will be improved with this partnership. So the types of solutions we are talking about are generally called fixed solutions. They may be fixed voice or fixed data usually used in the corporate space such as the banks which have numerous active branches that must remain connected on a secured network.
