ST. KITTS–UTS-Chippie announced on Monday this week that a technical team from St. Maarten recently completed several tests for the deployment of its Chippie Top Up system in the Federation.
Sales, Services and Marketing Representative Alfred Harley said the urgent need for the top up system was based on the increasing demand for the added value service as expressed by Chippie customers.
Harley said technicians from X-Treme Machines and Business Solutions and from UTS Curacao were on St. Kitts from Tuesday last week conducting the final leg of their tests. The tests were necessary, based on technical work done on the main GSM switch for Chippie to deploy the direct top up service.
The machines will be fully functional using GPRS to communicate with the Chippie switch and send top ups directly to the cellular phones of Chippie subscribers without customers having to scratch cards.
Because the state of the art machines operate on a GPRS platform this means that it would not be necessary for resellers to have the Internet to be able to provide this service.
Harley said, “Our customer base has seen rapid growth in recent months and while we continue to grow, we are compelled to comply with the demand for a top up service that makes adding credit to phones as easy as can be.”
Harley said one of the delays for the deployment of the machines was the fact that the company, UTS United Telecommunication Services, which operated Chippie’s GSM service in St. Kitts and Nevis, recognized that it could not simply deploy any service that was outdated. As such it was time consuming but necessary to find the latest technology available for top up service.
Harley said being part of a telecommunications company that recognizes the benefits of advanced technology was something he felt proud of with UTS-Chippie since it ensured that no expense would be spared to provide customer satisfaction.
He said, “Our move in this direction has come at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, but is a necessary move to ensure that our customers are satisfied.”
He added that this was also the case with regards to Blackberry, Roaming, GPRS and other services that the company is preparing to deploy locally.
