Zain! Oh Zain!

I’m not an authority on matters marketing, but this last Saturday I discovered the biggest reason why Zain is a distant second to Safaricom at the moment. Poor marketing.

The typical customer doesn’t know half the services Zain has, and in my opinion if you’re selling a retail product, you should sing about it till your customers want you to shut up. Safaricom got this right. Case in point, I don’t listen to radio, don’t watch local TV channels, yet for some reason, the phrase ‘Niko na Safaricom’ is in my head. Go to any small town in Kenya, and the predominant colour is green. Over 50% of shops are the Safaricom green, with one Zain shop tucked in a corner.

I’m a Zain customer and last Saturday I had some time to spare, so I toured their customer care centre , again where they have failed in having 3 care centres in Nairobi if I’m not wrong (Sarit, Mombasa Road and Koinange Street).

Anyway, I discovered the customer care area was departmentalised, and one department’s staff, didn’t know about products offered by the other  department (very mysterious).

At the end of the day, these are the products I discovered, and I’m willing to bet there are more but no one knows:

• Zain probably has the best postpaid package (this I knew a while back). The Kshs 4,000 package gives you access to equivalent credit, Zain to Zain calls (1 bob), Zain to other networks (12 bob), Zain texts (2 bob), other network texts (3 bob). Very clear network in my opinion.
• In addition to its unlimited internet packages (which is all it markets), Zain has a facility where you can buy prepaid bundles. I’d always incurred such high costs using internet from my phone. I visited 3  different customer care staff members to find out how this works, but apparently if you dial *180# you get options to do this, the bundles come at almost half the price of the Safaricom bundles. Of course the speeds are much slower, but on phone it doesn’t make much of a difference really.
• Zap. The most under marketed service ever. It’s actually free to pay your KPLC and DSTV bills using zap, and one gets a confirmation text immediately and it takes up to 1 hour to have the account updated. I’m testing this, we’ll see this evening if it actually works (registered and used it to pay my DSTV bill). All I paid was KShs 10 when loading money on my phone, the actual bill payment was free.

I’m sure there are more, and I just wonder. When will Zain wake up? It’s a great network to be on, but who knows?