Coronavirus has left the global economy face to face with crisis. According to forecasts, all countries will see some record of economic collapse. Although there is no statistics yet and it is too early to take stock of damages, at least there is one thing the experts are all unanimous in: the biggest losses have been suffered by tourism, air carriers and restaurant businesses. Many other industries have incurred material damages, too. (Armenian Version)
Economist Pandoukht Martirosyan says it is difficult to predict when this situation will come to an end and when we will overcome the economic crisis. The specialist at the same time notices that the pandemic has created favorable conditions for growth and development for some business industries. The demand for telecommunication services and technology business products has grown now. Due to working remotely and educational processes there has been an essential growth in need for telco services and technology business products.
“A business cannot survive without other businesses’ services. Of course, we have to admit that nowadays both before, during and after the pandemic not only the businesses but also each of us are in constant need of connectivity as a trusted warrant of communication”, says the specialist.
Most vivid examples of superfast-pace growth and development of technological business products are the video-conference platforms. At the beginning of the pandemic the unbelievable boost of demand for Zoom was the most discussed thing, which was followed by Microsoft Teams, and had Google and Facebook immediately launching their similar platforms. Telco companies are usually the ones timely responding to such situations; Beeline, a leading telco carrier was of those responding asap. By the way, Beeline knows the needs of a business by own experience. When switching over to working remotely, people in Beeline knew how to set organizational priorities. The telco operator put utmost effort to meet the demands by business customers, offering them what they would likely need.
Accordingly, Beeline have revised their services provided and in parallel offered services required for organizing remote work. Beeline have created bundles that include landline internet, mobile connectivity, Microsoft office 365/ 365 Premium licenses and a laptop. All this coming in a bundle and under one account and making the process of payments easy for the business customers. Furthermore, Beeline was the first company to launch Mobile ID service in Armenia for the purpose of signing documents and contracts online.
In the context of pandemic, executing online contracts and making contactless payments to secure the safety of customers and employees is highly crucial. To assure this, there are several options for fast and safe payments in Beeline such as the website pay.beeline.am, BeeMoney e-wallet and My Beeline app. For shopping SIM cards and mobile phones online, there is E-shop, which provides the opportunity of free delivery to customers countrywide.
The company stated that during the last two months they have performed tens of thousands of deliveries and connections of services, whereas based on feedback from businesses they updated the “Personal Office” service, where the business customers can manage their corporate bundles and receive any information related to bundles, such as financial statements, call detailing, etc.
Moreover, this is where the business customers can get more information about “Corporate VPN” service. This is a service of developing a local network, installing server and network devices. Beeline informed us that before, in order to connect to “Corporate Internet” or “Corporate VPN” services, a customer had to build an internal network by own forces. Now the business customers no more need to apply to different providers. Beeline team shall deliver the full service, network-related works, end-connections and testing.
Amidst global pandemic now more than ever the businesses need to notify their customers of suspending operations, reopening, delivering services, changing forms or sharing their news. Bulk SMS is an efficient tool to attract potential customers for many businesses.
“Venus” electronic shop has been a longtime customer of Beeline services. They informed us from “Venus” that they were satisfied with the service level, particularly mentioning the fact that now they could enjoy better terms of using “SMS-info” service than it was before.
“Now we can inform our customers of any promotions and news via text messages any time of our convenience, which is more important to us. Especially now, when the customers have to stay at home while they still have their smartphones with them anytime and anywhere. Therefore, sharing our news with the customers via text messages is much more efficient. Besides, now thanks to the “SMS-Info” service of Beeline we are able to keep tens of thousands of customers in the know of our sales and promotions within only ten minutes”, said Marine, an employee from “Venus”.
In scope of their “SMS-Info” service Beeline is also collaborating with state agencies such as Ministry of Health by providing toll-free calls to the hotline numbers, with Ministry of Education, Science and Sports by providing affordable connectivity bundle plans to schoolchildren, teachers and students.
Furthermore, resulting in a cooperation with Ministry of High-Technology Industry, Beeline has developed offers with special prices for the companies engaged in online sales but using international hosting.
“We are not the only one providing online sales and delivery. There are restaurants accepting orders online for food delivery, online shops, where you can buy almost anything, and taxi services also operating online. Pandemic made us face one more challenge: the servers are most of the time located outside Armenia and in the context of closed borders administering them could be an issue. As a result of cooperation with the Ministry of High-Technology Industry we shall offer special Hosting and Colocation terms to these companies that could become not only commercially viable in the global market but would help resolve logistics and management challenges as well”, they said in Beeline.
We will keep the track of new initiatives and offers in scope of the “Business for Business” format. Although the global pandemic has caused huge losses to the businesses, this is also a good opportunity for a business to stand up on their feet by helping one another.