Wouldn’t you like an experience that gives you flexibility, value and reward? An experience that serves to not only engage with you and your customers – as an entrepreneur – but also adds more value and creates disruptive solutions to challenges that they face in their day to day routines. Every day, people make the choice to purchase a product or use a certain service and the one question surrounding that decision is, ‘Is it worth my money?’
An example of one such scenario is the story of Florence Kamaitha, founder of the Pad Heaven Initiative, a social venture that manufactures low cost sanitary towels that are hygienic, of good quality and are washable & re-usable; a key importance of these one of a kind products that seek to address the issue of the over 900,000 school girls who miss classes up to 4 days a month due to lack of these products. Florence wants to change the narrative of menstrual hygiene in the country and she says that if it were not for the effectiveness of technology and the way it has helped in enabling the effective selection and delivery of goods to her customer, then her business wouldn’t be as effective. At the end of the day, every transaction has to bring back a certain amount of value to Florence and the same case applies to every other entrepreneur.
Kenyans have always had a strong spirit of entrepreneurship and just like Florence, are looking to maximize the value offered by their small businesses. Issues like making bulk SMS messaging a friendlier option or the lessening of transaction fees in purchasing a product are some not-so-small solutions that would make the life of Kenyan entrepreneurs a lot easier.
Safaricom yesterday introduced Flex – a new customer experience that would seek to reach out more to its ‘hustler’ clientele by allowing their customers to use their airtime to buy ‘Flex Units’ which can then be used for data, voice and SMS messaging with no fixed allocation to any of the three services
In line with the strategic pillar of Safaricom’s Customer First need based approach, the new Flex product has been structured in a way to ensure the telco provides specific needs to its customers who deal with very specific need-based issues on a day-to-day basis. For example, taking into consideration the entrepreneur who needs to deliver products to specific customers on a day-to-day schedule, certain needs to be met; and if they are not met, then the customer doesn’t receive their product. This is the narrative that Flex wants to change.
The Flex Bundles are also in line to give more value to their customers; hence the tagline #GetMore that promises to deliver more value for customers’ money. They are the all-new flexible way to browse, call and SMS easily and conveniently with only one bundle. The Flex units also offer you more value every time you send money using your M-Pesa account.
How to purchase Flex Units
Dial *100# or *200# (for Postpaid Customers) and select ‘Flex’. You can then choose your bundles from the options below:
- 115 Flex units @ Kshs 99 valid for 24 hours
- 700 Flex Units @ Kshs 599 valid for 7 days
- 3,100 Flex Unis @Kshs 2,499 valued for 30 days
The Flex Bundles are then equal to:
- 1 Flex Unit is equivalent to 3MBs when browsing
- 3 Flex Units which are equivalent to one minute or 1 Flex Unit is equivalent to 20 seconds of talk time
- 1 Flex Unit which is equivalent to 3 SMSs when texting
Unlike other products, Flex offers up to 35% more value with the flexibility to use your Flex Bundles between voice, SMS and data and is dependent on what plan you have selected; be it daily, weekly or monthly.
