Cable and Wireless chief commercial officer, Mariano Doble (Photo: Aston Spaulding)

The roll out of its bundled minutes calling plan on Monday would make the second time Cable and Wireless Jamaica (CWJ) has overhauled its market approach in its bid to win back customers, most of whom and more would have gone over to rival, Digicel.

The first was two-and-a-half years ago, when then newly appointed CEO, Rodney Davis launched the Anyone plan which lowered cross-network rates by $7 a minute.

When launched in September 2005 C&WJ had 600,000 subscribers in Jamaica but the number remains the same now. In addition the firm incurred tremendous losses last year, when it racked up $807 million in pre-tax losses over the six months to September 30, 2007

The Anyone plan was dropped and cross-network rates are still lower than competitors by as much as $5.50 a minute at peak, but now, as then, C&WJ faces the daunting task of breaking the fierce loyalty shown by Digicel's customers, stemming from a strong marketing campaign by the Irish-owned telecom and the baggage of negative goodwill derived from its monopoly status prior to the liberalisation process.

At the start of C&WJ's first campaign Digicel reportedly had 1.3 million subscribers across the Caribbean and now boasts closer to two million subscribers in Jamaica alone.
What's more, the entity will have to be watchful of MiPhone which was heavily capitalised by America Movil to build out a new GSM network in its own bid to grab market share.

C&W's chief commercial officer, Mariano Doble is hoping that the bundled minutes coupled with free phones and improved customer and network services will bring over customers.

"These plans offer massive savings when you compare them to the rates being charged by our competitors," he told a small gathering of journalists at C&WJ's headquarters on Monday.

Over the last three years Digicel has not responded by lowering its rates or bundling minutes and interconnection rates between mobile companies remained unchanged.
AS a result, under the Anyone plan, there were times in the day when the cost of cross-network calls exceeded the revenue earned from them.

The bundled package would avert the problem, Doble explained, as the cost of cross-network minutes would be covered by the cost of the package.

For instance, the lowest offering for pre-paid phones includes 200 minutes intranetwork, 40 minutes for other networks and 40 minutes international calls for a cost of $799. The offering would translate into a saving of $1,980 to make the same amount of calls using the current plan, Anytime, which charges $8 a minute for intranetwork calls and $12 a minute for internetwork calls.

But the cost of calls to outside networks and international calls would fall within the $799 charge.

On the other hand, should a user exceed their minutes available for cross-network calls, they will have to top-up with credit to make those calls or change their package to the next one in line.

Apart from the free phones which are being offered to subscribers of the new offerings, called UltraPak for post-paid subscribers and SuperPak for pre-paid customers, who make up over 90 per cent of its customers, Doble expects that the improved customer service will also help draw more customers.

"Over the last three to four months we have improved service levels," said Doble. "Abandoned calls to our service centre has dropped from the teens to less than one per cent, while more than 85 per cent of call are handled withing 30 seconds."

For this to happen the British-owned telecom had to "redefine its agreement" with the call centre to which it outsourced its customer service centre.

The American firm, Accent took over that side of the operations back in mid-2006.

C&WJ plans to launch more offerings to the market in another three weeks, which will include the implementation of top-up services that will circumvent the use of SMS texting or dialing-in.

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