A recap of the MTN Zambia March #MTN1HourChat with its CEO

14/03/201614/03/2016 Sandi

MTN Zambia held its March edition of the hour-long online chat on its Facebook page called #MTN1HourChat with its CEO Charles Molapisi last Friday, focusing on mobile money and the future of a cashless society in Zambia.

There were very few questions asked about mobile money itself in-depth, with one subscriber asking about a payment gone wrong where he was charged transfer fees:

While another makes it seem like the Kapiri branch may have to answer for having charged a client K15 to ‘upgrade his account’ so he could deposit K500 in his Mobile Money account:

The rest of the queries ranged from the text messages that MTN sends its customers on a daily basis and how they can be utilized to share more information than they currently do…

…to messages about when 5G is likely to be established in Zambia because 4G seems to have slowed:

There was also a call for a developers conference, for those who do not want to focus on developing mobile finance products only. Mr Molapisi referred them to innovation hub BongoHive, whom MTN Zambia recently partnered with to onboard local developers that might be integrated into the MTN platform:

As has been observed even in previous chats, Mr Molapisi doesn’t give away too much information when answering some questions. Trying not to make too many promises they can’t keep maybe? I don’t know. It would be nice to get more specifics for some, rather than referring subscribers to customer services centres or saying “We’ll look into it.”

It’s a start, at least, opening up dialogue between the business and its consumers in a tough market right now as subscribers seek the best services in the mobile space amongst the 3 mobile operators in the country, alongside Airtel and Zamtel.

Lastly there was a concern as to why there were very few competitions lately from MTN Zambia:

So as you can see, we have a hint of a competition being arranged with Samsung very soon. I’m going to presume it has something to do with the Samsung Galaxy S7. What do you think?