The Belize Telemedia Limited has been receiving a lot of flak over the last few weeks with some announced changes that may affect some consumers. Today we spoke with Dionne Miranda, the Head of the Customer Service and Public Relations who explained what has brought about these changes.
DIONNE MIRANDA
“We needed to upgrade the network so that we would be able to provide value added services that our customers are asking for. We want to be more flexible in our service provisioning including our offering of promotions and all that. As you know, we had stopped doing the triple up for a while and we wanted to be able to offer that back to our customers and offer them more flexibility but our system was restricting us from doing that and when we contacted our international providers, they informed us that we needed to become more industry standard compliant so that we could be offering what is available in the first world within our network as well and with that came a whole level of planning and preparation.”
The planning and preparation that Miranda speaks of, involves the clarification of how the credits on a digicell phone is separated and used.
DIONNE MIRANDA
“In that planning and preparation, the first stage was separating of the bonus; it’s very simple, really; the bonus that you receive as a gift, which is free, is your bonus balance and your primary balance is the money that you put in with the cash that you paid; it had to be separated based on the fact that when we are trying to do some of these additional promotions, for example, a raffle; if you are able to buy a raffle ticket out of the free bonus then we are not selling a raffle ticket, per se, it’s actually BTL subsidizing the cost of that and so we had to separate where your money was and where the money was that we were giving you. I know there has been a lot of confusion in terms of we’re telling people what to do but the only difference that has occurred with this change is that the bonus balance can be used for anything you want except for international calls/texts and calls/texts to the other provider.”
The most recent announcement coming out of the telecommunication company is the connection of phones that have had to be forced onto their network which Miranda says has been causing problems on the network.
DIONNE MIRANDA
“We’ve noticed that we have been having a bit of calls being dropped and data latency and we did a thorough investigation to see what was causing that and we identified that the telephones that we were forcing onto the network which were proprietary phones that belonged to AT &T, Sprint and others; we were forcing them onto the network and what they were doing was eating up our resources that you, the valued customer should be using instead and so, we decided that we had to do this because it makes sense to take care of you, who is already our customer and to make sure you are getting the optimal service that you deserve.”
Miranda assures BTL’s subscribers that these changes are for a greater good and more benefits down the road.
DIONNE MIRANDA
“We have a lot of great services for post-paid customers and we realized that prepaid people aren’t able to enjoy that and that is the largest part of our base and we have to do something more for the prepaid customers and so, now you will be able to do prepaid roaming soon. We are going to be able to offer entrepreneurs who come up with a great app but require payment via a telephone medium and we will be able to do that because the primary amount is out of the person’s primary amount of money that they have and so, we are expanding in that area.”
And, if you are wondering what will happen to the inventory of the various cellular phone distributors, we will be finding out tomorrow as BTL has scheduled a meeting with these companies for Tuesday morning.