Night Shift Bundles by Safaricom is a product meant to be a bonus to Safaricom customers who purchase 1.5GB, 3GB, and 8GB data bundles. Each time you purchase any of these data bundles, you get a 50% bonus usable between 10PM and 10AM the following day. Safaricom describes the bonus in the following words,
We are giving you something to be cheerful about as you burn the midnight oil! The Night Shift is now a tariff and it is designed just for you! For every 1.5GB, 3GB and 8GB bundle you buy, you get 50% bonus absolutely free!
Related Article: The New Safaricom Night Shift Bundles – a completely useless offer.
One thing about these offers is the lie that they are absolutely free. This reminds me of a college trip that took us to Kisumu and while roaming the town, my close friend and I found ourselves in this supermarket in which some beautiful girls were running a promo of a certain soap company. The promo was that you buy one soap and get two free. So I told the beautiful girl to give me the free soaps as, after all, they were absolutely free. She declined. What Safaricom ought to understand is that you cannot get the “free bundles” unless you buy them.
Secondly, the way the “free bundles” are tailored are very biased. You’ll spend Shs 4,000 to buy the 8GB bundle and get 4GB night shift bundle. Essentially you have bought 12GB bundle broken down into two: within the first 14 days, 8GB will be used between 10AM and 10PM while 4GB will be used between 10PM and 10AM each day. For some reason, Safaricom wants you to exhaust your night shift 4GB bundle within the same period another person who bought 2.25GB at Shs 1,000 is required to exhaust their 750MB night shift bundle.
I called Safaricom to point out this bias and they told me that they have structured their offer that way because anyone buying 8GB means that person is a heavy Internet user. This assumption is not true for everyone. Some people, me included, prefer to buy 12GB at Kshs 4000 for economic reasons. Buying 2.25GB at Kshs 1000 means you bought 2.25MB for one shilling. However, 12GB for Shs 4000 means you bought 3MB for one shilling thus you spent slightly over 33% less compared to the other options.
But I prefer not to buy the 12GB because I would lose more than 3GB after two weeks. My night time data usage has roughly averaged to be 40MB daily. This means that after 14 days I only use 560MB of data. With 750MB available whenever I buy the 1.5GB bundle, I always lose not less than 190MB.
Someone would point out that probably I do not exhaust my night shift bundles because I go to bed early (e.g. by 10PM) and wake up late (e.g. by 8AM). The former is false and the later is false too. I am one person who cannot go to bed before 1AM, but I also wake up fairly late always past 9.30AM. On a day that I go to bed early which would be at 1AM, I would have spent 3 hours on night shift bundles. Averagely therefore my available hours for night shift bundles do not exceed 4 hours. The day time bundles get me awake 100% of the time.
Safaricom data structure is supposed to benefit those who want to burn the midnight oil like me but as you can see, these people have merely 4 hours or so to burn that data (33% of the night shift time). An ordinary person who goes to bed at 10PM would probably wake up at 5AM. After preparation for work, driving in the traffic and settling at work, that person will not have the time to access the night shift bundles between the 5AM wake up time and 10AM before the data is turned off. The same person will also not have the time to use before bed time as he/she must go to bed early in order to wake up early for work.
If a person who burns the midnight oil like me cannot normally exhaust the 750MB night shift bundle within two weeks and a person with a normal sleep-wake cycle has no time to use the night shift bundle, then who does Safaricom intend to benefit with the offer of 4GB night shift bundle to be exhausted within two weeks?
I have tried several times to ask Safaricom to adjust their offer especially the expiry period but my pleas have fallen in deaf ears – probably because no other data users have raised any issues regarding this insane offer.
As a company that present itself as an entity that cares about its customers, Safaricom should be in the forefront in coming up with products and offers that are truly beneficial. Just having an offer in the name of “Night Shift Bundles” that practically benefit no one is not ethical. It is not ethical because offers make customers feel that they have got value for their money. If I bought that soap in the Kisumu supermarket, I could have felt satisfied in so many ways. The “free” offers could have been used until they were exhausted, even if that exhaustion could have been 20 years down the line (by the way why do we have data expiry dates at all?)
This is how I suggest for Safaricom to serve customers in regards to the night shift bundles; first they need to extend the expiry date where 750MB night shift bundles expires after two weeks as currently is the case, 1.5GB night shift bundles expires after one month and the 4GB night shift bundles expires after two months. Secondly the bundles should run either between 6PM to 6AM or between 8PM and 8AM so that most users get the privilege of using the so called offer.
If they find my suggestions uneconomical then I suggest they discontinue the offer since, as the offer currently stands, it is an outright psychological gimmic that adds no value to those who would practically benefit the “absolutely free offer”.
Related Article: The New Safaricom Night Shift Bundles – a completely useless offer.
Well…interesting perspective.
1. On the contention that the bundles are not free….I suppose Safaricom is providing more capacity than you have paid for. The extra capacity thus provided (at no additional cost) would qualify for the term ‘free’. But these are merely semantics.
2. On usage, I think the tarrifs benefit very different types of users:
a) – The downloaders: These folks have applications that manage download activity while they sleep. They are probably the lot targeted by Safaricom and would easily exhaust their bonus data allocation
b) – The media streamers: You tube and other video streaming sites consume a significant amount of bandswidth. As network performance often improves in the night due to low traffic, this lot cruise the night away, consuming video content voraciously (and cheaply too)
c) – The gamers : No, not the rabid candy crush addicts. I’m talking about the gamer with a console who wants to play online on hosted servers. Intensive play consumes data on a massive scale with a player easily going through his entire monthly allocation in less than a week.
So as you can see, you may very well be the exception and not the norm for the heavy night data user.
Thanks for the insight. I thought that downloaders, streamers and gamers could be happy by the “free” bundles but they are a niche; guesstimate is that they are less than 1% of subscribers.
An offer available to virtually any subscriber should be structured in such a way that more than three quarters of users can see and feel the benefits. Providing a bonus to 100% of customers that can’t serve 99% of them beats the logic of the offer.
If they extend the expiry dates as suggested in the article Safaricom would have increased the satisfaction of more than 70% of data subscribers.
Don’t they want to make most rather than neglible few Customers happy?
Safaricom is completely deaf on all complaints.
This is a nice read. I am one troubled client of Safaricom as I loose my night shift data bundles but have never considered it the fault of Safaricom!
A quick question. Do you buy the bundles because of the night shift/free bundles or because you need the bundles you’re actually paying for? It’s totally understandable to feel cheated about the “free pack” but its like complaining the free drink that comes with the pizza you bought is not enough to gobble down that pizza. Anyway its my two cents
If you think Safaricom cares Forget It. They are dubious because to me as a software developer, those so called additional bundles make no sense. I sleep at 3AM earliest and usually subscribe to 1000 Bundles, but have never exhausted them. I usually download any exe to exhaust their remaining night bundles. Our plea is let there be no timing with Airtime you have purchased.
Yes, you are right, 10pm to 10am is a terrible time they chose. They did so just to steal our hard earned money.
Check out this:
Today
at about 5am I checked my bundle balance at exactly 6:34am and it was
1183.826mb with 613.090mb Nigh Shift. Beleving that it was Night Shift
time, I used updated all the apps from Google Play Store that were
shouting at me to be updated. I disconnected the data before 9am.
I
am back in the house and just checked my balance and this is how it
reads now: You have 638.039mb Data Bundle, 613.090mb Night Shift Data.
If this is not stealing, then I am not sure what stealing means!?
admin35 Sorry for the bad experience. The time for the night shift bundles were changed. Currently the night shift bundles only run from 10 PM to 6 AM. Here is the latest article on the http://www.kachwanya.com/safaricom-night-shift-bundles/