Safaricom now to pay subscribers in case of a call drop

Safaricom subscribers will now get a refund every time a call drops while on its network.

The mobile operator yesterday launched the service that will see callers refunded a maximum of one minute in extra talk time as compensation for the inconvenience.

The service which now promises to help the firm deal with customer complaints over network quality is set to set it apart from its rivals coming at a time when voice has come under increasing pressure.

“We have piloted the service for about five weeks now and every caller will have a maximum of five refunds a day. Our call drop rate is at 0.3 per cent,” Safaricom Chief Executive Bob Collymore said at the launch yesterday.

The firm yesterday launched the products to be known as the Safaricom guarantee, My data manager and My subscription manager, that it says are aimed at returning the power to decide when a call or data plan is disconnected to the customer.

Every time a call is dropped, the operator will send a short message to the subscriber with an apology and a refund of up to 60 seconds in talk time.

Safaricom, which has been investing on average Sh30 billion every year on its infrastructure, has been at loggerheads with the market regulator over its network quality.

Several Quality of Service reports by the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) in the past have found all four mobile operators in Kenya as non-compliant in all or some of the parameters.

The fights escalated to a point where the regulator was forced to tie the renewal of Safaricom’s licence to achieving the minimum quality standards. CA director general Francis Wangusi, who also attended the launch, said the new service was in line with its push to have operators improve their quality of service. Mobile operators are fined Sh500,000 when found to offer poor network quality but the amount has been seen as too little to cause operators to invest in improving quality of services.

With a customer base of 25 million customers, a network problem affects many people.
Collymore said the operator handles about 30 million calls and 70 million short messages in every hour and the latest initiative will help assure customers of its commitment to deal with the network challenges.

The firm also launched a second product that will help its subscribers to monitor how they are using the their data bundles.

Collymore, who joked that customers had previously accused him of ‘eating’ their bundles, said the data manager product will allow users to monitor the usage of their data and automatically disconnect them once their bundle runs out.

In the past, customers were automatically switched to the more expensive data packages once their bundles were exhausted without their knowledge in what saw them end up using their airtime.