Today was a double and triple day for Telemedia, but their customers weren't too satisfied with the way the new system works. Your Digicell credit is now being separated into a bonus and primary balance. The primary balance is the money you put into the account and the bonus balance is the free credit you receive on a double and triple up purchases. But here is where it gets a little technical, because with your bonus balance, you are not allowed to make international calls or send calls and text to a Smart costumer, instead you would have to use your primary balance. And while many costumers on facebook were blatant about their dissatisfaction in the new change, General Manager of Customer Services, Dr Dionne Miranda told 7news it's the company's way of moving forward towards industrial standards to improve the products and services offered to customers.
Dr. Dionne Miranda, General Manager of Customer Services
"What we've gone ahead and done is we've had to move towards industry standards because we were trying to improve the products and services we were offering to our Digicell customers and in doing this industry upgrade, an upgrade to our system we separated the bonus balances that customer receives when they top up, so right now there is a primary balance which is the money that you put into the account and your bonus balance is the free credit that you get when you do a double up on a double or triple day. This occurred on January 15th, but however it didn't impact customers until today because this is the first double/triple."
"Realistically we were giving triple days and the reason was because we were subsidizing certain services when we allowed the purchase out of free credit and these purchases, international calls and calls to SMART. Basically when we gave you free credit and you call those two locations, we then had to pay to those companies for processing those calls, so we were losing money. We realize that we could start lowering rates and give you better deals if we were to then start charging those out of the money that belong to you and out of the free credit that we provide as a bonus to you on double and triple day that we could allow you to have some fun with it."
"Now, every other service that you do with the company; buying your bonuses, buying your GPRS, your 4G - all of that comes out of your bonus which is your free credit and then the things that we have to pay for will come out of your bonus. This opens up a lot of us. One of the things that we were able to launched on the 15th January as well is that we were able to lower international rates and the reason why, by having it in the primary bonus we were able to charge you the real cost for it rather than when it was in the bonus, we had to figure out how to charge so that I could have the money enough to pay the external provider. That made it very simple and we were able to lower international rates."
"I don't know if you notice, but calls to the US are 30 cents per minute right now. In 15 countries, you are able to call at a much cheaper rate which is something that Belizeans have been wanting for a while and so we are also able to offer more services. We are going to be having pre-paid roaming. I am sure that you see those big signs like text to win and all of that. We are going to be able to offer promotions because now when an entrepreneur like yourself comes along and tell BTL lets do a raffle together - we can't do a raffle because if you pay for the tickets out of bonus BTL is funding the entire event."
The change went into effect on January 15th and today was the first double and triple up day since then.
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