Smile Nigeria has introduced several new innovations in its offerings, all intended to improve the customer’s experience.
The first innovation was a few weeks ago where they introduced the ability for a customer to dynamically select the speed of the service. On a customer’s personal MySmile portal, you can actually select the speed of the Smile service and you can change it whenever you want. The reason for this is in the series of customer tips available on their web site or on the Smile Facebook pages – to help people manage their data usage. A strange thing to do for a company that sells data, but Smile’s approach is to help customers use the internet efficiently and effectively, not to encourage the use of data through people being unaware of what is happening.
As an small example, one of the tips is about YouTube. Not many people realise that YouTube detects the speed of your internet connection and automatically, without you even being told, delivers the video in as high definition as it can. On Smile’s super-fast internet connection, this means you always get high definition, when on another provider’s slow network you would get standard definition. So what you may ask, well the problem is high definition video will use at least 3 times more data as a standard definition because there is more detail in high definition. Just look at the difference in file sizes between a standard definition and a high definition movie. So Smile now offers you the option to reduce your speed to fool things like YouTube into thinking it is on a slower connection and then going back to high speed for emails, browsing or downloading. [eap_ad_1] There are lots more tips, but Smile has now gone further. On the same personal portal page, you can now select to disable access to high data sites. Again you can select and deselect at any time. So if you wanted to restrict people in your office from watching videos, there is now a button to switch off this sort of access, so saving your data. Even for home users, this feature may also be useful to restrict the children from accessing video content ! There are also buttons to stop BitTorrenting, which is again a whole are for high data usage you may not know is happening, and again Smile has very helpfully provided a tip and an information video on what it is and how to make sure you manage it properly. Other buttons can be used to stop cloud based services from copying all you data onto remote storage using things like DropBox (more tips are available) and software updates. All of this is trying to give customers control and to help them manage their data and get the best possible service from Smile.
Not satisfied with just listening to customers concerns and offering them ways to manage their data in ways that are simply not available from any other service provider, Smile has also introduced Smile ON. This service will be a boon to all of us who run out of data a few days before the end of the month. With Smile ON, if your data bundle runs out before the end of its validity period, you can still enjoy access to the Smile service, the only catch is they restrict what you can do. There is not speed limiting, you still enjoy the networks super-fast access, but you can no longer use video streaming, bittorrents and other high data usage sites or applications. What you can do is what you really need to do, that is your emails, web browsing, Skype calls and social media. There is a full explanation on their Web Site, but the aim is to allow Smile customers to keep using the service until they are able to top up again and continue to use the full service. As usual, there are terms and conditions, but the service now comes as part of a 5GB bundle or if you purchase any higher sizes of bundle.
All in all, Smile has introduced some fantastic new innovations, some of which are not available from any other operator in the world. We hear that there is even more innovation to come over the next few months and that their expansion plans for Abuja and Port Harcourt are underway now and will be complete by the end of September so even more Nigerians can benefit from the Smile services.
