Foto: Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories

The new service will offer businesses free Internet calls to any company listed in the Mediatel-run Zlaté Stránky, the Czech yellow pages, provided they have Skype software installed. The deal added fuel to the Czech market’s battle of directory services.

The cooperation is based on an exclusive partnership within Mediatel’s parent company, the European Directories group, and enables Skype users to call businesses for free, according to CEO of Mediatel Czech and Slovak Republic Kimberli Lewis. The service is only available to companies listed in Zlaté Stránky. “Once they arrange this service with us their blue ‘Free Call’ button will be displayed for Skype users anywhere on the Internet where the advertiser’s phone number appears,” Lewis told CBW. The blue “Free Call” button is not only presented on the company’s record in the business directory, but on its webpage as well in order to allow customers to contact them without fear of paying too much for the direct call. “There are benefits for both advertisers and users. The advertisers can generate more visits by allowing users to contact them at no cost and the users benefit clearly from this. Skype is also a great telecommunication alternative and puts our advertisers in a unique position to use this communication method to find new customers, and it is easy to use,” Lewis said.

Skype, which has around 480 million users globally, is offering only a technical part of the project and calling is not free for the advertising companies, which have to pay for their potential client’s calls directly to the Mediatel company. Nevertheless the advertiser will be able to choose from the specially designed packages, so the pricing will be optimized to their needs. In addition the paid calls on Skype remain considerably cheaper than standard telephone fees. The one technical requirement is that the user needs to have Skype software installed, including a special add-on for the Internet browser. Mediatel said it believes that the service will support small and medium sized businesses in particular. And the extent to which many people in the country, not only young people, have grown accustomed to using Skype, bodes well for the service’s future.  

Spreading the connectivity

For Lewis the future of communications makes it essential to find new ways of bringing customers to advertisers as well as of providing users with easy ways to contact advertisers. This is where she sees Skype as the next logical step. “It is an alternative to the normal fixed and mobile line market, and a communication channel often ignored by directories, therefore the partnership brings natural benefits to both companies. I think that this partnership is a natural step into the next generation of directory products. The ‘Free Call’ button is also a strong value which differentiates the advertiser from its competition. Research among users of websites with free Click2Call features proves that 82 percent prefer companies with the ‘Free Call’ option as the first choice. So the Skype ‘Free Call’ button is a new tool to get more leads not only from presentation in the online directory but from the whole web presence of the advertiser,” Lewis said.

In order to allow for the realization of the free call service Lewis said it was necessary to create a special platform between Skype and European Directories that would be able to activate and deactivate this service as well as to guarantee the reporting of data traffic. “The unique thing about this solution is that it must support a service for nine non-independently functioning companies in nine countries and these companies have different, not only technological infrastructure of its own production and customer services, but also different parameters of this service for their market,” Lewis said.

As mentioned before, European Directories is active in nine countries across Europe and the cooperation with Skype is effective in all of those countries. The countries include the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, Austria , Sweden, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Gibraltar. Lewis considers this a new step for Mediatel which shows that the company, with a long tradition on the Czech market, still has a lot to offer and shows that it could still be innovative in the new times of Internet life. “There are so many different Internet behavior usages, but we concentrate on helping people find businesses when they need services or products. Our research shows that there are different groups of people, those who want to locate businesses in their area, which is why we have radius search, people who want to compare businesses, which is why we have incorporated the comparison function, people who want advice, therefore we have incorporated ratings and reviews, and those people who may know the name of a business and want more information on that business. But this behavior also changes and we watch it closely and adjust our user and advertiser offers accordingly. But the one thing that is sure, the more information a user has on a business the more satisfied they are and the better chance a business has to win a customer,” Lewis said.

Tougher competition

Mediatel has been active on the Czech and Slovak markets since 1991 and from that time it has developed its services many times. From the standard printed yellow pages the company added a web platform to follow the growth in technology and the increasing online presence in the country. Recent developments include a new system of business directory listing, with interactive parts of the presentation such as maps and SMS services, among other features. They also developed a Zlaté Stránky application for the iPhone from Apple, which, benefiting also from the built-in GPS that shows close results first based on your actual position, makes finding a contact significantly easier.

The cooperation with Skype has only added to Mediatel’s competitive edge on a busy market. “I am sure that this new service is also surprising to the market, so I believe it stirs up the blood,” Lewis said. The growing development of the Czech directory market over the past year has raised the competitive stakes. A new and potentially strong competitor to Mediatel has appeared in the .tel domain concept that has ambitions to become world’s largest telephone list, embedding the contact information into the DNS of the .tel domain and selling the domain for presentation (see “New .tel domain launched in the Czech Republic”). Prague has become the first city in Europe with a city-wide network of .tel contacts being developed and this novelty has the potential to stir things up for the traditional market leaders.

Skype is carrying out some advances of its own. At the beginning of the year the company signed a contract with mobile phone manufacturer Nokia Corporation to supply its software for Nokia’s phones. A month later, an application for iPhone was announced. Users of the modern phones could benefit from the spreading Internet connectivity that came mostly with the iPhone, where the connection cannot be effectively controlled. This fact pressured Czech operators into adopting a friendlier policy on Internet connections for mobile phones although the growing use of Skype on mobile phones is providing unwelcome competition for the mobile operators that they would like to slow down as much as possible.