Maxis successful with small-scale outreach

Malaysia – In just under a month, Maxis Communications' newly launched voice portal service has reached the 150,000 unique user mark with 300,000 calls made to the service.

This success was achieved through word of mouth, user database and some radio advertising since the product was launched early August, says Nikolai Dobberstein, who is Maxis’s head of strategy and head of new businesses.

Speaking after the media briefing of the product in KLCC recently, Dobberstein said advertisements were placed with Hitz.FM (targeting English listeners), THR (for Tamil listener base) and MY FM (Mandarin listeners).

Adding that radio advertisements were Maxis’s preferred outreach channel, he said the telecommunications company is still looking into other ways and means of promoting the voice portal, which recognises a user's voice command and accords multilingual mobile content like jokes, caller ringtones (CRT) and news services based on voice instructions.

The company's products and new business division’s head of products and infotainment business T. Kugan cited CRT as most popular content, with over 40% user hits, followed by jokes.

The voice portal has 450,000 minutes of use so far and customers are billed  RM1 per minute for the service and to date, users spend an average of two to three minutes.