Delta Innovative Enterprises offers Hallo prepaid call card again
By Venkatachari Jagannathan | 18 Dec 2002
After lying low for a year, the city-based company is coming out with catchy slogans. Is the company taking on India’s cellular companies? Also remember this: Hutch’s ad line is ‘hi.’ And is the short messaging service (SMS) generating good revenues for all the mobile players?
Says Deltagram managing director R Kothandaraman: “We are not competing with any telecom player. On the contrary, every telephone subscriber is a prospect for us.” The company is re-launching its Hallo prepaid call card.
The one-minute voice mail card, first of its kind India, enables a buyer to convey a message — pleasant, unpleasant or embarrassing — in his or her own voice to another person located anywhere in the country for Rs 5.
The system works as follows. A Hallo card buyer has to first dial the number mentioned on the card. Thereafter the menu-driven interactive voice response system (IVRS) will guide the caller to record his or her message and the number (landline or mobile) to which the message has to be transmitted. A reply option is also available.
“There is also the facility to send messages at a predefined date and time, and the same message can be sent to a group of persons,” adds Deltagram executive director P K Venugopal.
Launched a year ago the product didn’t click at the market place as the company faltered in its distribution strategy. Correcting that failure this time, Deltagram has hired Trans Oceanic Purveyors, a city-based marketing company, to distribute the cards at retail outlets.
“We will first focus on Tamil Nadu and expand it to other southern states. The national rollout will happen in six months’ time,” says Venugopal. The market segments targeted by Deltagram are airlines to pass flight information to its customers, individuals, clubs and associations for sending greeting and other messages.
“Corporates, too, can use our service for sending soft payment reminders, convey messages to its sales force and distributors to greet its customers,” adds Venugopal. According to him, a couple of greeting card companies have expressed interest in the product.
“The infrastructure consists of a central server located in Chennai and 65 hubs — V Sats. We will also harness the GSM technologies with fallback mechanisms like the Internet to transmit messages,” he says.
Deltagram, in the meantime, is awaiting a loan sanction of Rs 10 crore from commercial banks. The company’s Rs 17-crore equity is held shared between Kothandaraman and P Vaidyanathan, Integrated Enterprises (70 per cent) and India Direct Fund.
