On 31 August 2007, Sarvodaya convened a meeting of the Telecenter National Alliance, made up of most of the operators of telecenters in Sri Lanka. The objective of this activity is mutual learning among the telecenter operators.
One of the sessions included presentations on the implications of the teleuse @ BOP results for telecenters by Rohan Samarajiva and on the new EZ pay mobile payment service introduced by Dialog and the National Development Bank by Eran Wickramaratne.
The basic argument in the T@BOP presentation was that with 41 per cent of BOP households already and likely to reach 70 per cent, if the government’s proposed taxes do not go through, telecenters will have to develop different strategies to attract phone owners and the remaining non-owners.
1 Comment
johann
your presentation is great and informative. I agree that the int’l call tariff is very high in Sri Lanka specially to the Middle East which I presume make up most of the Int’l calls from rural Sri Lanka. Due to the increasing population of Sri Lankán’s finding employment in the Middle East the number of Int’l calls to this region is going to increase in the coming years.
As the presentation mentions and is a known fact the tariff revision that is being discussed since 2003 does not have a date for implementation so a reduction in the call tariff is hindring growth of this sector in a big way.
Telecenter have a big future in Sri Lanka if they can be more customer friendly and market oriented for the long term. Most of the present centers are profit oriented and do not have an intention to retain the customer so that he or she returns to the same center to use its facilities once again. This is mostly because the center owners do not know the potential of what they own.
The customer does not return to use the facility frequently as they found the first visit to be an un-friendly experience or too expensive.