With Yoodo, you get to call the shots

PETALING JAYA: Yoodo, a do-it-yourself kind of telecommunication offering, is the culmination of an idea for an agile and adaptable platform and giving customers their heart’s desire, freedom of choice and control.
Speaking to SunBiz recently, Yoodo’s head Farid Yunus (pix), who has been a Celcom employee since 2006, said the idea of creating a digital startup using Celcom’s network occurred to him following his return to Celcom in 2016 after being seconded to one of the telco’s mobile network virtual operators, Red One Network Sdn Bhd.
Farid pitched the idea of a digital startup using Celcom’s network, but operating independently of the group to the telco’s CEO, Michael Kuehner.
“Big companies are not very agile. We needed to move fast and he (Kuehner) agreed and bought the idea … we went to Celcom’s board of directors, they bought the idea … I got the budget and nine months later here we are,” Farid explained on the initial stages of the conception.
“The world is changing, people just do everything online on an app but old school telcos find it hard to cater to this. Overseas, in Europe. a lot of telcos have launched similar types of digital brands. We are not the first – by no means – so we looked at the model and how they did things,” he added.
Farid said what they needed to find out though, was what Malaysian consumers wanted.
“We did a whole bunch of focus groups here in Malaysia, and you know what works in France might not work in Malaysia. We tried various concepts with the focus groups, which included name your budget, suggest the plan or a long shopping list where you just check what you want or customise it yourself,” he said.
Their findings were that Malaysians resonated the most with having the liberty to customise their own plan and the power to make changes according to their needs.
Farid is confident that consumers will pay a premium for the offering.
“We are looking at a net promoter score (NPS) of around 40, meaning more people will recommend us rather than not recommend us. If you look at telcos today, their NPS is zero or negative, meaning more people would not recommend them.
“If you look at people like Uber and Grab, they have NPS scores of 50-60. We are targeting a 40 versus the zero of the old-school telcos,” Farid said, on his aspirations for the startup.
RHB Research analyst Jeffrey Tan said it is premature to gauge the impact of Yoodo in the telco market, but he believes that it would add to the “breadth of offerings in the market”.
“It’s premature to gauge the impact – the strategy here would be to complement current mainstream offerings (as opposed to cannibalising) with telcos serving a growing demography of digitally savvy users.”
However, Tan said Yoodo will provide mobile subscribers with greater choices, flexibility and convenience.
“With diminishing competitive advantage in pricing and network, the opportunities herein lie in the provision of innovative and cost-effective solutions to sustain and/or increase wallet share,” he said.
Tan noted that digitalisation is an essential path for a telco to stay relevant and to become the customer’s key digital lifestyle partner or provider. “Digitalisation is not confined to products and services but encompasses processes, procurement, customer service, network architecture, etc,” he opined.
With hybrid service providers such as Yoodo offering customised plans and Unifi Mobile offering no expiration to credit, will customers still gravitate to cheap packages and unlimited mobile data?
On this, Tan foresees that there are still opportunities across different market segments for telcos to monetise their mobile internet traffic.