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By Handoko Suwono – Datacom
Telecentre
For the past two years I’ve been operating a simple and small telephone kiosk which
initially had only two phone booths. The aim of opening a telephone kiosk is to serve the
local community with public phone service and then create better social activity. The
surrounding neighbourhood is of dense population and consists of two churches, one mosque,
one school, not far from the market place, and only a hundred meters from the main road
where shops and banks are. We are not the first that open a telephone kiosk.
Even though the market is known (the local community, regular customers and passers by or
walk-ins customers), a few marketing tips can help boost the income of the telephone kiosk
so we can sustain for competition against other nearby telephone kiosks. There are now
about eight telephone kiosks within 200 meters from our kiosk.
First to do is to open regularly at definite hours from 6.00am till 10.00pm every day
for seven days a week. We employ up to five persons based on shifting basis to avoid
intermission in the telephone kiosk services. This marketing tip is done so the customers
can adjust their need to call at a specified time and knowing that the telephone kiosk is
always open to suit their needs.
The second marketing tip is to add other service which still relate to
communication needs as provided by telephone kiosk that we provide also fax service and
receiving mini ads for local newspapers. Other services that is being offered are
secretarial services such as receiving and forwarding phone calls as well as fax receiving
and forwarding. This added service will help also creating loyalty of our customers to use
also these services for conducting their social or business activities besides using our
public phone.
We have other secretarial services such as word processing service and email service in
our office which are seldomly used by the customers.
The third marketing tip is to provide the telephone kiosk with
refrigerated soft drinks, in this case we are serving Coca Cola, which really help sell
the telephone kiosk for the customers to use the phones more likely although the selling
soft drinks generate a small fraction of income. So the Coca Cola helps boost the income
of the telephone kiosk.
The other tip is just to "please" our employees by putting a television set in
the telephone kiosk so he or she can watch the television shows while waiting for the
customers. Some time in the evening when the telephone kiosk were full with customers, the
employees can make friends with the local customers or the regulars. This fourth
tip also can form a long lasting relationship with our regular customers that we know them
by names.
We are now operating three phone booths, the third is placed in a separate room with air
conditioning at the entrance of the planned or proposed internet café. This third
phone booth is prepared with desk with ample space for them to do their writings. We want
to create a home ambient in our office so the customers can feel as they are in their own
homes when using our facilities and not to treat them as just a customer that has money to
pay. The money will come to flow for itself as long as we can keep our regular customers
to visit and use our telephone kiosk.
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