MTN delivering value its digital strategy and other innovative services

Over the last year, MTN has made remarkable progress in its growth strategy, delivering value to its customers and enabling them to enjoy the benefits of utilising affordable smartphone devices.

To date, as part of its drive to deliver a seamless and distinct customer experience, MTN has focused on perfecting its digital performance to drive growth.

MTN has enabled its customers to buy 7.6 million smartphones, which reflected a 10.6% increase in the number of devices in 2015, leading to a 37% rise in data revenue pushed up by attractive voice and data offerings.

"The unpacking of our digital strategy and investment in improving our infrastructure, as well as a focus on delivering a seamless and distinct customer experience - coupled with new innovative products and smart devices - has allowed MTN to continue achieving milestones in providing affordable mobile broadband services and life changing products," says Larry Annetts, MTN South Africa's Chief Consumer Officer.

MTN's strategy stands out for its uniqueness to focus on delivering value to its customers, with a strong focus on creating a unique customer experience.

In January to March, MTN volumes of devices sold to South African customers surpassed the market by 61.3%, attributed to its strategy to focus on affordable and own-branded smart devices to bridge the digital divide.

"The Mint and Samsung devices have been our biggest selling smartphones in the past year, while premium brands Samsung and Apple smartphones, as expected, delivered the most value to our network in 2015.

"We have seen a lot of improvement in the sales of our LTE technology devices, benefiting from our investment in enhancing our LTE network infrastructure," says Annetts.

In support of its vision to provide its customers with a bold, new digital world, MTN is taking its network to customers and has greatly invested more than R11 billion in 2015 on capital expenditure to enhance and grow its infrastructure, with a focus on aggressive LTE device strategy.

"Our business is to ensure that we help bridge the digital divide and provide our customers access to innovative and accessible solutions. We achieve this by focusing on addressing the needs or daily challenges they face to connect to the Internet. MTN has a clear long-term vision, and commitment to deliver innovative services and a distinct customer experience to bridge the digital divide," says Annetts.

This is supported by MTN's proposition to deliver value-packed deals - which provides converged services such as voice, data and SMS - with the latest devices.

MTN is also focusing on getting correct its split on technology usage by customers on its network through connectivity via 2G, 3G and LTE services.

"As a result, we have experienced a 33% migration of our customers from 3G to LTE technology since September 2015 until April 2016. We also experienced a 47% migration from 2G to LTE from September 2015 until April 2016. We are expecting billable data usage by our LTE subscriber base to reach 211% by 2017 and voice billable minutes of LTE to continue to rise," says Annetts.

As part value creation for customers, MTN recently unveiled its first digital store at the newly opened Mall of Africa.

The high-tech retail store is designed to offer a seamless in-store customer experience.

The flagship store is the first of many to be rolled out in South Africa, and caters to convenience and simplicity. As part of its move to provide a seamless customer experience, MTN has also developed an MTN app, which provides contract customers with real-time billing and spending control, and no more surprises on monthly bills.

MTN's drive to embrace digital world is yielding results and is adding value in various platforms. To exemplify, MTN Caller Tunes experiencing a 1600% rise customers using the service and MTN Play experiencing a 50% growth, while Service Delivery Platforms such as MTN Quiz Master, and saw a 300% in active customers playing the games.

"We have also piloted a product called 'call in notify', where customers can share their status with their loved ones when they call them without listening to the message.

"We are proud to have undertaken this journey to focus on creating value for our subscribers, ensuring that our IT infrastructure is agile to meet the needs of our customer and creating an intimate relationship through our best ecosystems and platforms driven by a vision to deliver a bold, new digital world," concludes Annetts.