Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT), the only fixed wire-line telecommunications service provider in the country, is coming up with a new strategic marketing plan to prevent the sharp fall in fixed wire-line connections and its demand.
The new plan is now being devised under the directions of the newly appointed board of directors of SLT, officials said.
Rather than rise like most telecommunication sectors, the number of fixed wire-line connections fell from 933,536 in 2008 to 871,248 in 2009. The SLT has lost 62,188 subscribers within the year and the company has failed to attract new customers due to weakness in an earlier marketing plan and its implementation, they added.
The SLT has disconnected telephones of at least 75% of the 62,000 subscribers as they failed to pay accumulated arrears of telephone bills running up to millions of rupees. The SLT has not taken any legal action to recover a large sum of dues from defaulters, officials said blaming the poor management of the legal department of the company.
However they noted that most of these subscribers had to disconnect their telephones due to economic difficulties while some others shifted to fixed wireless and mobile telephony. A large number of public servants who used fixed wire-line connections shifted to mobile telephony, as they have been provided with more concessions, through, the Upahara package introduced by Mobitel, a SLT subsidiary. Only 10% of the target set for the new fixed wire-line connections and 40% of the ADSL Broadband connections have been achieved for this year. This reflects the weaknesses in the marketing division which mainly focused its attention on marketing communications, SLT officials said.
SLT trade unions have brought all these aspects to the notice of the new board of directors and action has been taken to rectify it through the implementation of the new strategic marketing plan making use of SLT’s fully integrated/diversified telecom services of fixed wire-line and wireless and mobile telephony, ADSL and mobile broadband access and Internet Protocol Television [IPTV]. The company plans to bundle all these services into a single package to attract more subscribers under the new strategic plan. The company will also improve its after sales services. The SLT wire-line subscribers will soon get all these value added services under this new plan, they added. |
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