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Genie Mobile drives mobile Internet adoption
London, Jul 06, 2001 - Genie, BT Wireless' Mobile Internet Business has today hailed as a success its Genie Mobile service,
the UK's only exclusively online mobile phone business. Launched in November 2000, Genie Mobile had an average of 800 customers a day purchasing mobile
Internet phones on the site during the month of June, with that daily average rising to 1,400 per day during the last two weeks of the month.
A key segment of the mobile phone market has been attracted by the convenience of Genie Mobile's online shopping, care, billing and fulfilment services,
making Genie Mobile BT Cellnet's highest volume channel reseller. The e-management of the customer experience offers convenience and speed, as well as
passing savings along to the customer through lower overhead. Inverse to the trend in mobile phone sales, Genie Mobile sees the bulk of new customers, over
65%, in contract rather than pre-pay sales.
The innovative Genie Mobile model is a key component of the Genie business, which this quarter saw registrations to its integrated portal increase to 5.5
million worldwide, using compelling and "sticky" content to draw a large base of mobile phone users to its web and WAP sites across Europe. In the UK, once
phone owners become Genie users, they are exposed to the Genie Mobile shop and its attractive offerings. This marketing cycle allows Genie to lower the cost
of acquisition and enables Genie Mobile to pass the additional savings along to the customer.
Further, Genie is a fully integrated mobile portal with exciting and highly usable content being added on a weekly basis. This focus on making mobile Internet
services easy to use and relevant to users' interests has resulted in an increase in WAP page impressions to quarterly average of over 103 million per month,
up 37% from the quarter ending March 2001. Examples of popular new applications include the highly viral WAP Chat, now drawing over 2 million WAP pages
impressions daily, as well as celebrity voicemail greetings and an exhaustive selection of downloadable ringtones and icons.
"Genie Mobile is adding real value to the Genie bottom line by owning the relationship with high value mobile Internet customers, driving mobile Internet
adoption and driving these subscribers to BT Cellnet," said Kent Thexton, president of Genie. "This is a tremendous achievement in such a short timeframe, but
we won't stop there. We will continue adding value and will expand the service to other territories, like the Netherlands, where we are equipping 500,000 Telfort
WAP phones with WAP mobile banking applications for a bank partnership summer promotion."
"These results support the strategy we laid out in November to offer the most competitive and compelling services and tariffs on the market," said Laurence
Alexander, managing director of Genie UK. "Genie Mobile's web-based self-service has enabled us to cut out the middleman and pass on cost savings directly
to our customers. Together with attractively priced text messaging and WAP packages, Genie Mobile has proved a compelling offer."
Customers who purchase online through Genie can choose from highly competitive pre- and post-pay mobile tariffs. These tariffs offer unmetered WAP; allow
customers to pay their bills online; keep track of calls made and costs; change their tariffs online and have their queries answered online free of charge 24
hours-a-day, seven days-a-week.
Earlier this year, Genie Mobile's web-based customer service solution was named one of the top10 customer relationship management (CRM) applications by
research company Aberdeen Group.
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