As part of the GSMA mWomen Working Group meeting, Jean Fernandez, Senior General Manager – Customer Care, Mobitel presented on the process the company had gone through to launch its scaled mWomen offering, Liyasara. Below is a summary of what she shared at the meeting.
Mobitel was an early champion of the GSMA mWomen Programme and currently has a multi-disciplinary project team working on mWomen initiatives for the company. Its early Phase 1 mWomen offerings included competitive women’s pricing plans for voice and broadband; an interactive voice-based lifestyle and information portal dedicated to women and priority service counters for female customers at Mobitel main branches.
As part of its preparations for entering Phase 2 of its mWomen initiative, Mobitel engaged in research to discover more about what lower income women in its market want and need from life in general and specifically from mobile services. Through this research, Mobitel identified that in Sri Lanka, many women lack convenient access to valuable and credible information relating mainly to health and also financial and legal literacy. Based on these insights, the Mobitel mWomen project team developed a suite of services, later known as ‘Liyasara,’ to attract and serve women subscribers, with both affordable voice and SMS rates and access to health information, including child, maternal and new-born health, cancer, child psychology, diabetes, and other topics found to be relevant to Sri Lankan women through Mobitel’s research. Mobitel also recognized that it would be best to partner with local health experts for this VAS information, and thus set-up relationships with:
- Perinatal Society of Sri Lanka on maternal and new born health
- Sri Lanka College of Oncologists on cancer awareness
- Sri Lanka Foundation Institute on child psychology
- Cerebral Palsy Lanka Foundation on cerebral palsy
- Diabetes Association of Sri Lanka on diabetes awareness & management
Mobitel also learned through its research that more Sri Lanka women want life insurance in order to protect their families and that it was particularly out of reach for most low-income women. Thus, Mobitel partnered with Sri Lanka Insurance as the Life Insurance provider to arrange cover, automatically provided for everyone person who subscribes to Liyasara with no additional cost than the SIM bundle itself. With this service, Mobiltel launched the very first mobile life-insurance product for pre-paid and post-paid consumers in their markets.
‘Liyasara’ was officially launched on 8 March, International Women’s Day 2012, and we look forward to hearing more about how Sri Lankan women are responding to the service over the coming months.