Quarterly updates have become customary here at Standard Gateway, they serve as a channel for self-evaluation and communication to our partners, clients, users and fans. It is hard to believe that we are already in the middle of 2021, time has been elapsing faster than we thought. We missed some of our targets last time, but we are nevertheless happy to communicate that we are surely making some good progress.
Our last quarter update highlighted our goal of complementing our education offering with a new service “kezastore.com eticketing” that is aimed at completely transforming how travel tickets are acquired with our “No more reason to go to the bus park without a ticket” slogan. Indeed despite actionable progress, we have been setback by different factors including some out of the pandemic, most notably Covid-19 that continues to shuttle transport services in Rwanda, Uganda and neighboring countries
Contrary to what we all have been hoping that lockdowns were behind us, nearly two weeks, it came with no surprise that due to the increase in the number of cases governments have had to take some measures to curb the spread of the virus, amongst which included the suspension of travels that links districts and provinces. This has had a direct impact on the implementation of our business development plans.
Below are some summary activities for both Q2 and Q3
Activities in Q2:
- We continue driving forth our business development for eTicketing. We kicked off outreaching to travel agency operators for both Rwanda and Burundi. For Burundi we have already had success in meeting with most major travel agencies while in Rwanda we are shooting to have meeting with five travel agencies by the end of the quarter as part of the outreaching phase
- Our Business development team continues to focus on refining our plans and strategies for both Burundi and Rwanda and we are looking to strengthen the Rwanda team with additional resources to focus on Rwanda Northern and Easter Region.
- We have started engaging a business development rep for Kenya to help us start the market analysis and planning for e ticketing product
- We are working on final touch in finalizing the eTicketing Packaging, while our main offering to travel agencies are nearly complete, we still haven’t finished packaging everything together, we see this activity spilling over a month into the next quarter
- We developed some key capabilities that will allow us to partner with travel agencies and automating handshakes that will prove critical to solidifying our partnerships. Some of them include: Payment APIs that will allow us to disburse funds to travel agencies automatically both through banks and mobile money, Communication APIs (Text Messages, Emails, etc.) that will enable us to notify our travel agency partners and our customers
- As far as our eduXamination (education and examination) products, we continued to develop exams and have witnessed increased daily visitors from mid 300s per day on our exam preparation platform www.nationalexamination.com with thousands of past keys and past national exams from 2000. Currently we only have about exams on kezastore.com, with our new online exams, we are receiving daily messages from students and teachers requesting for more exams.
Planned Activities for Q3
- Our primary goal for Q3 would be to ensure that we are able to partner 2-3 travel agencies to make eticketing a reality, we also plan to execute on the activities below:
- Finalize eTicketing Business Development Package highlighting all of our offerings: eTicketing Platform for users, Company Page for Travel agencies, Baseline Social Media Content for media operationalization and maintenance and support.
- Organize events to communicate to our users, partners and customers of our services, solutions and products (Ongoing)
- Kick off the packaging of our eduXamination products to include past keys and past exams (Freely accessible by anyone), online exams (Offered on a freemium model) Data Warehousing (Offered to school for only official report cards), Analytics and Insights (Offered to schools)
- Assemble an eEducation Business Development Rep Team.
- Clean up and operationalize our finances and reporting processes
For sure Covid-19 continues to dominate newsrooms, some even wonder if it will ever pass; what surprises us is how travel continues to be such an essential service despite the risks. As we continue pushing for our eTicketing Product, we can’t be more excited to have the opportunity to be the ones to offer such a much needed solution in such dire time.It is our firm belief that this is a solution that will not only make travel seamless and enjoyable, it will also be a tool to combat the spread of the virus and accelerate our return to the new normal.
Our hope is that there will truly be no more reason to go to the bus park without a digital travel ticket from kezastore.com eticketing.
Thank you for reading and If you have any feedback, partnership inquiry, etc do not hesitate to reach out to us.
Cheers…
SG Team
N.B: This article was originally published at http://standardgateway.com/blog
Standard Gateway is an online and offline products and services provider focused on education and technology, visit http://standardgateway.com for more information | You can also visit our different products: www.nationalexamination.com | www.edrivingschool.org | www.kezaplex.com | https://www.itike.rw/v2 |