Vodacom tried to charge 15c per Please Call Me

Dennis TFebruary 11, 2022

73 3 minutes read

An official Vodacom notice regarding its Please Call Me feature has surfaced online, and it revealed that the mobile network provider never intended on keeping the service free forever.

In fact, Vodacom had attempted to charge 15 cents per Call Me message in the past, which led to its many subscribers ditching the feature. Call Me’ has been a big success,” the company wrote in the notice.

“On the first day in operation, about 140,000 customers made use of the service. It will be free until December 31 this year and thereafter cost users 15 cents per transaction,” Vodacom added. After Vodacom’s unsuccessful attempt to shift the feature to a paid service, it made Call Me messages free again.

However, it discovered that many of its users were abusing the service. It enforced a limit on how many Please Call Me (PCM) requests could be submitted per user per day to curb this behaviour.

In the same notice announcing the initial success of Call Me, Vodacom thanked Nkosana “Kenneth” Makate for coming up with the idea that the company’s product team ultimately developed into the well-known USSD-based service.
Vodacom has been in an ongoing legal battle with Makate surrounding compensation for the idea.

Further on in the notice, Vodacom’s then-managing director, Andrew Mthembu, expressed his admiration that the idea came from a staff member.

“Most impressive to me was the fact that the idea of the product came from one of our staff members whose job is not related in any way to product development,” he said.

“This led me to ask myself one question: What would happen in this company if we all were to come up with workable solutions to our company’s problems like Kenneth did?”

Recently, Makate managed a significant victory against Vodacom when the Pretoria High Court ruled that the mobile network provider must recalculate his compensation fairly.

Vodacom’s CEO, Shameel Joosub, had previously offered Makate R47 million after the Constitutional Court ordered the mobile operator to negotiate appropriate compensation for the idea in good faith.

Makate rejected the settlement offer of R47 million, alleging that it was well below what he was due.
He previously stated that his compensation should be around R20 billion, based on a 5% share of an estimated R205 billion in revenue his legal team had calculated Vodacom had gained from PCMs over 18 years.

However, in a more recent interview with eNCA, Makate declined to state how much compensation he sought, saying that Vodacom must now come up with an offer in line with the High Court judgement. The High Court has ruled that Makate is entitled to 5% of the total voice revenue generated from the Call Me product over 20 years, between March 2001 and 2021.

In addition, the court ruled that Vodacom should assume that 27% of the number of Call Me messages sent resulted in return calls and that those calls lasted 2 minutes on average.

The court has left it to Joosub to work out the yearly rate, which should blend the effective contract rate and effective prepaid rate. In each case, the court stated that the tariffs could not be less than the effective rates published with Icasa.

MyBroadband spoke to a Vodacom spokesperson, who said that the company would be appealing the judgement. Vodacom remains of the view its negotiations with Mr Makate were held in good faith, as determined in the Order of the Constitutional Court issued on 26 April 2016,” they said.

Source: mybroadband

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