IT has been a very challenging year for Telecom Fiji Ltd with business investments crawling at a slow pace because of the recent elections.
TFL’s acting general manager business sales retail, products and marketing Joseph Naua made these comments at the TFL’s corporate cocktail function held at the Holiday Inn on Wednesday night.
“It has been a very challenging 12 months for business in Fiji because we had elections and there have been other events happening this year and we felt that it was important that we take time out and catch up with our valued customers who we have relied so much on for our business and they have been loyal to TFL,” Mr Naua said.
“This event is just to say thank you to all of them and basically network and discuss future prospects and new things that TFL will be bringing out into the future and some challenges we have had in the past.”
Mr Naua said this year had been a year of solidifying their network and they had invested heavily in their back end systems.
“It has been a while since we have done this and with the changing nature and demand of the industry we have prepositioned TFL now to move out of the telephone space and become a fully fledged ICT player where we have moved away being associated with the phone line as the phone line now is not our core revenue any more.
“Our biggest revenue now is data and most of our customers are slowly coming around to the fact that we have invested heavily on our back-end systems to make our networks more robust and the value of that is that it simply brings out the quality of service and reliability to our customers.”
Mr Naua said they had also tried to solidify customer experience front end challenge to ensure that customers had ease of access.
He said TFL had moved a lot of their customer interactions online.
“Broadband by far is our biggest product right now.
“We have only just launched fibre to the home and that has been a big hit.
“We have started launching it at Bayview and Namadi Heights and we are moving on to the Fletcher Rd areas as a pilot phase. We have another two large phases after this which is the greater Suva area and in the Western Division and thereafter we will be moving to the North.
“What the fibre has done is that it has opened up a lot of opportunities for businesses and residences.
“For businesses the pipes are bigger now.
“The connectivity between all their branches are now more stable and most of our broadband customers they now have access to very high speed internet in the comfort of their living rooms. ”
Mr Naua also said they had only recently signed up with Netflix and would be launching that very soon.
“Our challenges have been no different from other companies. “There have been challenges of educating the market in terms of where we are going and delivering our strategies.
“A lot of businesses would have slowed down investment this year as they would have been cautious because of the elections. “But I think all is well and good now.”
