Tariffic survey reveals preferred mobile networks

Tariffic, the cellphone bill optimisation company’s new consumer website went live on Tuesday, 1 March 2016, backed by a strong consumer marketing campaign. Since the launch, thousands of South Africans have used the site looking for the best contracts based on their actual unique usage across all of the four mobile networks.

Results pouring in from the first 7,000 people who have used the cost saving site indicate that 53% of consumers want to see the best packages based on their actual usage across all four mobile networks. This means that in making purchasing decisions for cellphone contracts, most consumers are looking for the best deal as opposed to the best network.

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When consumers selected which networks to include or exclude from their results, 17% of customers were only interested in Vodacom, while 21% don’t want to see results from Vodacom at all. This is a fairly high number showing consumers have either a love or hate relationship with Vodacom. The relatively high price of Vodacom contracts may be one of the reasons why Vodacom has a reasonably high 'exclude' percentage.

8% of Tariffic users only want to see MTN contracts, while 12% are not interested in MTN at all. Results for Cell C are very different; only 3% of South Africans are interested in Cell C only, while 9% are not interested in Cell C at all. This may indicate that the Cell C branding campaign has a long way to go in building consumer loyalty.

Concerning results

Results for Telkom Mobile are even more concerning. Only 2% of people were interested in Telkom only deals, and 8% didn’t want to ever see a Telkom Mobile result in their deal offers at all. Although Telkom is the newbie on the block, this indicates that they are yet to find a place in the hearts and minds of South Africa.

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Of all users, 82% were still happy to view contracts from the two big networks, MTN and Vodacom combined, while only 9% specifically didn’t want a contract from either or both of the big two.

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While the Tariffic site is aimed at consumers, Tariffic’s principal business to is to provide cost savings to corporate clients. According to Tariffic, many corporates can save up to 40% of their cellphone spend by getting onto the correct packages.

“We find that most companies are interested in staying with their current networks, or in moving to one of the two big players, namely Vodacom and MTN, with Vodacom taking the majority of interest.” Seeff notes that the two smaller operators, Cell C and Telkom, are often not automatically considered by Tariffic’s corporate client base," says Antony Seeff, Tariffic’s CEO