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What are the Anthill Cool Company Awards?
The Cool Company Awards were launched in 2006 as a way for Anthill to acknowledge and celebrate Australian organisations that are doing things differently to bring about positive change. Cool Companies stay one step ahead of the rest. They breed leaders who are rule-makers and rule-breakers. They are trend-setters in attitude and action. Quite simply, they are … cool! More.
KISS Mobile
Company: KISS Mobile
Website:www.kissmobile.com.au
State: VIC
Category: Micro Business
We suspect the first word in this small telecommunications company’s name has nothing to do with liplocks and everything to do with “keep it simple, stupid.” Founded in Melbourne, Kiss Mobile offers a pay-as-you-go alternative to the contractual phone plans from the big telcos.
Kiss Mobile provides customers with SIM cards for their mobile phones. Through the SIMs, people from select a usage plan that fits their mobile data needs. The plans charge a few cents per call, SMS or megabyte. The simplest plan — Kiss 15 — charges 15 cents per 30 seconds and five cents per megabyte. If someone calls another Kiss Mobile user, the first five minutes are free.
“It is deliberately different than what the larger carriers have been flogging and what customers are sick of,” the folks at Kiss Mobile say, “and it’s distinguished by its simplicity and level of engagement with customers.”
Kiss Mobile also distinguishes itself from the buy-and-use phones you can get from the store by providing customer support and shared-wallet access — several SIMs can share the available credit from a single account.
Even though the company has been around since 1994 (the business model has gone through at least a couple of iterations), Kiss Mobile continues to define the concept of small and nimble. It has no bricks and mortar storefront, and intends to stay that way. All business is conducted through the website, and its only full-time employees are its two founders.
The company has about 1,200 customers, a number that has doubled in the past 12 months. Its churn and complaint rate is among the lowest in the telco industry. There are plans in place to reward customers for referring Kiss Mobile to others.
Marketing, like everything with the Kissers, is web-based, as it uses sharpened SEO, online affiliates and gamification via Badgeville to attract people to their services and special offers. Good, old word of mouth and Facebook are strong promoters, too.
Kiss Mobile has no intellectual property to protect, largely because another company came along a few years later with much the same offerings. So, no IP, but a keen drive to stay competitive. “All we have is speed to market and to adapt, which we can do because we are small and flexible,” they say.
Another thing that won’t change — brashness, which is at the core of the Kiss Mobile culture. “We will have fun changing the telco world one customer at a time,” they say. “Our brand, Kiss, is so cool people thing they’ve heard of it when they actually haven’t.”
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