BlackBerry, the brain child of RIM(Reasearch In Motion), its most significant move in the mobile communication world was the release of its BIS(BlackBerry Internet Service) this brought about a convinience for many on surfing the net and put a massive foothold on the social networking game with BBM(BlackBerry Messenger). All in all these features were responsible for it being placed as the 6th most popular device maker. (Read..)
BlackBerry is seen as one of the leading brands when it comes down to sales figures, but for a company with such a driving force when it comes to bringing in clients, it some how lacked to satisfy many of them, seen with the crash that happened back in 2011 . Now when one looks at this situation from the communications point of the company it almost quite literally strips them of whatever credibility they had in the beginning. It brought about a sense of concern for consumers across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. It brought about unwanted attention for BlackBerry and set up an almost insurmountable task for them to start explaining and compensating for this "accident".
How South Africa handled it
In South Africa and across the whole world for that matter they set about compensating for the crash by giving away certain applications for free to download in App World (a mobile software shop available to only BlackBerrys). It is quite interesting to see how each of the major networks in South Africa went about compensating to their blackberry customers. Cell C offered their customers a R10 discount from the R60 internet service fee,Virgin Mobile offered R50 airtime and MTN said it would credit its users with R10.... While one may argue and say that to a certain extent it was not BlackBerrys fault for the events that took place with the network backing up, it does raise a question as to how much does BlackBerry really value its customers. When the media archives are drawn out and this event is examined, people will come to see that BlackBerry simply went about solving the technical issues and threw the rest of the matter under the carpet hoping it would be a hush operation and everyone would simply forget. To a certain extent one must compliment them on this because as much as people threatened to change phones as soon as they could, no-one really did, and as soon as the network was up and running again, it was like all had been forgiven and forgot. However you look at it BlackBerry has no real competitor when it comes to making a compact, practical and affordable smart phone and until then they can afford to fumble as much as they want....
it is very true that blackberry is seen as one of the leading brands when it comes to sales because when you look around, almost everyone has blacberry because of the BIS which makes surfing the net more cheaper. when a lot people use blackberry it causes traffic because blackberry users surf the net all the time e.g.BBM (Black Berry Messenger)
ReplyDeleteyeah it shows that having such a service, as innovative as it is, does have its draw backs
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