Over the 6 or so years that the service has been around and accessible to a significant number of us, its impact has been huge. For people like yours truly, it has served as a gateway to accessing various entertainment forms like video-on-demand, pay-per-view events, live sports, etc, being able to earn a living by running platforms such as this one and more. The same can be said of many other Kenyans.
At the same time, given the experience yours truly and others like him have had and the efforts by the team at Safaricom responsible for its fixed data products to get into as many Kenyan homes as possible, more and more Kenyans are now using Safaricom’s Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) product, Home Fibre.
As usual, with growth comes several challenges and those challenges have not been lost on people like yours truly i.e. the old customers. They are also some of the glaring challenges that new subscribers to the service encounter. For instance, there have been cases of delayed onboarding of new subscribers and, for some like yours truly, some dropping of the ball when it comes to expected services like timely reminders to renew the subscription.
What is Safaricom doing to assure the confidence of existing Home Fibre users as well as to get the attention of prospective new customers? In varied ways, we posed that question to Stephen Maina, a Senior Manager with the Fixed Data Tribe at Safaricom and his responses gave us a sneak peek into the telecommunications company’s focus at the moment and over the coming days.
For starters, for many of the concerns that we raised on your behalf as our reader/viewer/listener, the company is aware of them and actively working towards resolving them. For others, it was an opportunity for Safaricom to listen to user concerns with the aim of moving to address them, something that we hope they will do. For example, it’s yet another end month and, while I know it already and have planned for it, still expect to be notified that my monthly Home Fibre subscription will be up for a few days and I need to pay up.
You can catch Steve’s responses to us (with Tech-ish’s Dickson Otieno and TechTrends KE’s Nixon Kanali) in full and unfiltered in our latest podcast episode. There are some nice gems and insights. For instance, did you know that Safaricom quietly stopped pushing its set-top boxes and doubled down on providing a better internet experience instead because it was seeing more and more people make the switch to smart televisions that had more or less the same capabilities as the set-top boxes it was pushing thereby making them redundant? Now you know.
