Kenyans made 130 million reverse calls in the 12 months to March, underlining the growing popularity of the feature that enables callers to transfer call charges to receivers.
The service was introduced by Safaricom in 2019 . To make a reverse call, a customer keys in “#” before the number they want to dial.
A customer receiving a reverse call request sees the caller’s details appear on the screen, but once they pick up the call, they receive a voice prompt asking them to key in “1” to accept the charges.
The receiver is then charged at normal call rates. The feature was introduced to complement the “Please Call Me” service, which enables a customer to send five free messages to other customers requesting for a callback.
“Since inception, the number of customers engaging daily on the reverse call service has increased significantly, with reverse calls almost doubling from 73 million to 130 million,” Safaricom said in its Sustainability Report, 2023.
Profits from voice calls was once Safaricom’s largest revenue driver but competition from digital call channels such as WhatsApp and the growth of mobile money has made M-Pesa the company’s largest source of revenue.
Safaricom said M-Pesa revenue grew by 8.8 per cent to Sh117.19 billion in the year to March supported by increased usage and growth of chargeable transactions.
Voice revenue declined 2.6 per cent to Sh81.05 billion, taking its share in service revenue to a new low of 28.72 per cent. Voice was in 2016 making 51.1 per cent of Safaricom’s service revenue while M-Pesa was at 23.3 per cent.
To boost its call revenue, the company this year introduced a new airtime request service that allows subscribers to get top-ups from fellow network users.
The service, applicable to both prepay and post-pay customers while excluding subscribers on roaming, allows users to put a request to their close relations to send them Safaricom airtime with amounts ranging from Sh10 to Sh100.
