Customer centricity is key to success for MVNOs. Mariano de Osma, CEO of Guinea Mobile, provided some fascinating examples of how his team have built a thriving, customer-centric MVNO ecosystem using a multi-brand strategy and white-label solutions.
The MVNO opportunity in Peru
Peru is a small mid-market, with around 40 million active lines. Guinea Mobile was the second mover in the MVNO industry in Peru, launching back in 2019.
Originally, Guinea Mobile was positioned as a single brand focused on university students, but it struggled in its early years.
Since then, Mariano and his team have pivoted from their original business model. They’ve since used a more innovative strategy to achieve success across the country.
Why is customer centricity so important?
Guinea Mobile recognised a clear problem they knew they needed to solve, which is that the telecoms industry traditionally struggles with customer satisfaction.
The average NPS for telecoms companies is around 27. That statistic makes it one of the lower-performing sectors globally. And in smaller countries, like Peru, the average is even less, because MVNOs still don't have a big market share.
This is why customer-centricity became a key focus for Guinea Mobile. They recognised it as an opportunity to be different and break out of that trend.
Mariano de Osma, CEO of Guinea Mobile (MD): “Why is a customer-centric approach so important for MVNOs? Because it fosters loyalty, it reduces churn, and it stimulates organic growth for your business.”
Guinea Mobile now operates a multi-brand strategy, with customer centricity at the core of everything it does.
MD: “With that strategy, all our brands now exceed the average, and one brand even has an NPS as high as around 80.”
But how exactly did Guinea Mobile turn things around to become the number one MVNO in terms of market share in the country of Peru?
The four key pillars of a customer centric MVNO ecosystem
What are the four key pillars of Guinea Mobile’s customer-centric strategy?
1 - Targeting niche markets
MD: “When we make highly specific solutions for niche markets, we're able to increase our customer loyalty and have a very solid churn compared to industry standards.”
“Serving niche markets enhances customer loyalty. For example, niche-focused MVNOs typically see 45% higher customer retention rates compared to broad-market telecom players.”
2 – A white-label approach
Going white-label is the method of delivering products or services to customers under your own brand name, while sourcing them from a partner. White-label solutions provide companies the flexibility to enter the market quickly without heavy capital investment.
MD: “When we partner with existing companies that already have an existing clientele, we’re able to enter into niche markets that would otherwise be impossible for us, or would be super expensive to penetrate.”
By launching white-label solutions, Guinea Mobile has gained three advantages:
1. Brands that want to launch their mobile offering have a strong brand already
2. They have an existing, recurring clientele
3. They have existing distribution or points of sale.
White-label solutions have provided a vehicle for Guinea Mobile to grow its market share with the use of other brands.
MD: “Our partners have seen 70% faster time-to-market and reduced their operational costs to just 2% of what it would’ve cost to build and launch their own MVNO from scratch.”
3 - Leveraging data
MD: “Most MVNOs, and also MNOs, don't focus enough on the amount of data available and the opportunities it presents. Even in our case, I think that we have more space to use data, but we've been able to reduce churn by around 20% by leveraging data to offer tailored pricing and discounts to our customers.”
Using data intelligently to personalise services and improve customer satisfaction has been key to Guinea Mobile’s success.
4 - Multiple brands for multiple niches
MD: “A multi-brand strategy, targeting specific customer segments such as tourists, or IoT users, was instrumental in building customer loyalty for us. Both PeruSIM, our brand for tourists, and our Guinea IoT brand, have earned net promoter scores that are 30% higher than the industry average, driven by their customer-centric designs and tailored service offerings.”
A deep-dive into Guinea Mobile’s different brands
Wings Mobile
Wing Mobile was Guinea Mobile’s first white-label brand in Peru, using a multi-level marketing strategy. They had a group of sellers that sold white-label hardware devices.
Mariano and his team created an app for the sellers to be able to sell SIM cards and top-ups, which enhanced the activation of clients.
MD: “Instead of paying distinct payment gateways, we permit the clients to transfer us money, and we’d give them around 10% additional in top-ups. So, they were activating all of their community. This was super successful, given that financial inclusion in Peru is low, especially in rural areas where this was mainly incentivised. We were able to activate around 36,000 clients in just 15 months.”
PeruSIM
MD: “We realised that the market was offering bad plans, as our competition was offering pre-paid plans for tourists. Tourists had to physically go to a store. So, we decided to invest in prime locations, like airports, tourist information centres, and so on. We also introduced English staff to improve customer service for tourists, and offered 24/7 WhatsApp support.”
This smart, customer-centric strategy was supported by an all-in-one app where customers can meet all their needs and be activated in just three minutes.
This has allowed PeruSIM to activate over 75,000 eSIMs and SIMs.
eXIM
Guinea Mobile recognised that 6% of the 40 million devices used in Peru are iPhones, and that iPhones in Peru cost double what they do in the US. It’s common for people to go to the US to buy their iPhones.
MD: “As we know, since the iPhone 14, those phones are only eSIM-capable. But the market, and the MNOs, are not supporting eSIM that well back home. So, we have recently launched this brand, eXIM, to provide everything digital, in a one-stop app where you can, in three minutes, activate your eSIM. And we're only focusing on iPhone 14 and onward that are purchased outside Peru. We’ve made this very user-friendly, and we’re pushing the eSIM penetration.”
Guinea IoT
MD: “Here we developed a SaaS platform where distributors can focus on tailoring the plants they need, activate, deactivate, have live reports, and so on, which current IoT operators aren’t offering. That has helped us gain a very quick market engagement.”
“Key players are using Guinea IoT, as they like the flexibility of managing everything on their own platform. And the commercial way of getting to this market was more as a SaaS team, with customer success managers, not the typical support that telcos give. This is a 360-degree approach in terms of getting our clients.”
A proven way to enter the market
Mariano was also keen to point out that Guinea Mobile was not the first business to have done this. Surf Telecom in Brazil, and Oxio in Mexico, have also had similar success in Latin America.
Surf Telecom has more than 2 million lines in Brazil, and around 50 white-label solutions, including the 10 biggest soccer teams in Brazil.
Oxio began in Mexico, but has now also launched in the US thanks to great sustainable growth.
MD: “Using this model, we’re able to very quickly launch new brands. Not all work immediately, but it's not very costly to try out these different niche markets and position our different brands uniquely.”
“The multi-brand, white-label approach has made us focus mainly on tech, and how we can provide great offers to our customers through software, rather than investing a lot in marketing.
That’s returned good results for us.”
Key take-aways for MVNOs
A customer-centric strategy is essential for MVNOs to win customers, build loyalty, minimise churn, and accelerate business growth. Based on Guinea Mobile’s success in Peru, an intelligent playbook for MVNO growth would be to focus on niche customer segments, use white-label partnerships to engage niches that would otherwise be out of reach, and leverage data to personalise and enhance the customer experience as much as possible.