Almost 3 months later, the Econet VoIP website remains unfixed

L.S.M Kabweza Avatar

When Zimbabwe’s largest telecoms firm launched VoIP services back in January, they launched with a broken website. Broken in that most links were not working and the “Contact Us” page contained the contact information of the company that (apparently) supplied Econet the VoIP system, SysMaster. In short, Econet had forgotten to update the pages with their company information.  We posted about it a week after the launch because product launches are sometimes so hectic you don’t always get everything right immediately.

Today, close to three months later, the voip.econet.co.zw is still unfixed. More accurately, the only fix Econet implemented after the issue was highlighted was to deactivate the “Contact Us” link on the homepage so no one could get to the page. The page itself exists in the background with the SysMaster information. The move just resulted in more dead links on the site:

So when you visit the home page now, you can’t click on “How it works”, “About Us”, “Contact Us”, “Terms of Service” or “Privacy Policy” because the links just don’t work. Needless to say, information contained on such pages is very important to Econet customers and, more importantly, prospective customers.

You’d almost think Econet doesn’t want you buying the service as yet. Or maybe uptake has been too slow to warrant allocation of any meaningful resources to the product. Or maybe VoIP was just launched as a background project to provide an Econet alternative to the new VoIP services being launched by Aquiva, Aptics, Telco and the other Internet providers. And since none of these new providers has gone all out marketing their VoIP, Econet doesn’t see the need to spend dollars on VoIP that they could be spending on marketing the GSM calls and direct data business. How else would this go unfixed for such a period?

2 comments

  1. Richwell Captain Phinias

    Sad how they overlook such crucial items

  2. Prosper Chikomo

    Like I said before:

    http://www.techzim.co.zw/2012/02/a-how-not-to-launch-an-internet-based-product-lesson-from-econet/

    Econet Wireless > US$500 million a year business.

    Products:

    Econet Broadband > powered by SysMaster (USA (as told me by a Sysmaster agent via online help chat)

    EcoCash > powered by Pattern Matched (South Africa) http://www.techzim.co.zw/2012/04/ecocash-adds-200000-subscribers-in-a-month-growth-trend-since-launch/

    EcoLife > Trust Co (Namibia) (Newspapers and High Court)

    Website > powered by Joomla? ( he he)

    If there is a lesson for anyone from all this, it is that just use applications from others to make money. Life is too short to be imaginative and inventive. (laugh)

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