It is hard to believe that 2021 is over and we are now in 2022! Perhaps because of the pandemic, 2022 seemed so distant at the beginning. We at Standard Gateway wish you a happy new year 2022 and hope you have much to celebrate. We started 2021 with big plans like any other year; at the end we have had our successes and our failures. Nevertheless we are more than ever committed to driving our goals and mission in utilizing technology to come up with much needed solutions.
Our anticipation had been that by Q4, the pandemic will have become history! To our surprise, despite a higher percentage of vaccination in countries where we target, the numbers kept taking different shapes, with the virus mutating and becoming more challenging to contain. This resulted in a disruption in our business development plans. While we could do much of our internal activities virtually we had found it very hard to initiate and close deals without physical meetings. Luckily, so far there has not been a total lockdown after Q3 and that has allowed us to make some progress.
At the moment our business is divided in two segments: technology and education. In the educational sector we have continued adding content and driving a consistent visitor tally, averaging between 200 and 300 visitors a day. A good number of materials have also been developed and are ready to be published! On the technology side, despite covid-19 we have continued to push for e-ticketing product business development and developing technology tools to differentiate our offering.
If you have been following our quarterly updates, by now you know that eticketing is our newly developed product with the goal of completely transforming how tickets are acquired whereby customers will no longer need to go to the bus park without purchasing their tickets beforehand. Despite having a fully functional MVP though, our efforts in securing working agreements are moving slower than anticipated to the point that we are considering a change in strategy and positioning of the product.
Our original vision for Kezastore.com eTicketing has always been a platform where travelers can browse routes, choose routes, pay and get digital tickets, just like airline ticketing. However, with incredible roadblocks we are facing in securing MOUs and working agreements, we are considering layering the product in two stages: First route listing, where customers can only browse routes: by specifying departure location and arrival location; and second ticketing, which will allow buying and acquiring digital tickets. This will enable us to provide information value to our customers while we work through our partnership development with travel agencies operators.
In the meantime, we have reached to travel agency regulators and cooperatives for their inputs and have engaged a good number of travel agencies that give us good confidence that we are on the right track. Kezastore.com eTicketing site now includes a processing fee and a notification to those booking to alert travel agencies that have signed with us a working agreement whereby travelers can book online. For all others, travelers will be asked to proceed with booking offline.
The route is rocky, but we are making progress slowly but surely, and continue to be squarely focused on executing on our plan, creating partnership with travel agencies, regulators, cooperatives, as well as kickstarting marketing campaigns to inform customers on eTicketing and its benefits especially during this Covid-19 pandemic.
We believe that slowly but surely we are getting closer to our goal of completely transforming how travel tickets are acquired where travelers will be able to browse, select and pay tickets on kezastore.com eTicketing platform. Our plan for the time being is to embed technology in our outreach to our customers taking advantage of video conferencing whenever possible, but also prioritizing face to face, creating solid formal partnership with different players to make eticketing a reality.
Below are some summary activities for both Q4
Activities for Q4 2021
- We continue to engage travel agency operators and have a number of them ready to engage or already talking to our team
- We continue to building business development teams for other East African countries. Currently we have business development rep in Rwanda and Burundi and have starting looking into contacts for Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, with our new approach to start with bus route listing first, we see this as a practical way to move first and showcase our value to both travel agency operators and travelers
- We have continued probing into marketing firms in designing and running campaigns when we launch kezastore.com eticketing
- We have started on packaging our eEducation Products
- We have started the process of assembling the eEducation Business Development Team
Planned Activities for Q1 2022
- Chase and Finalize a working agreement with at least two travel agency operators in Rwanda and Burundi
- Launch and Drive Market campaign on buying tickets online: “no more reason to go to the bus park with no ticket, with kezastore.com eticketing”
- Organize events to communicate to our users, partners, and customers of our services, solutions, and products (From last Quarter)
- Finalize Social Media Content Generator Tool and Animate Standard Gateway Social Media to communicate to tech savvy internet users the benefits of our products and services (From Last Quarter) – This is a tools that will give us a competitive advantage and help engage with travel agency operators
- Establish eEducation Business Development Team to engage partnership with educational institutions, students and educators
- Finalize Packaging eEducation Products
- Finalize 2021 Reports
- Design and Kickstart Materials Development Dashboarding
- Kickstart Materials Development Review Board Meetings
- Internally Launch Sales and Marketing Operation
2021 has been a year like no other! 2022 will also be a year like no other, but we at Standard Gateway know it will be a much better year. We have been developing a number of products and solutions for you, we can’t wait to get them into your hands! We have now been telling you that browsing routes and booking tickets online will be a possibility soon: 2022 is the year!
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 Here you can read our past quarterly updates and other articles.
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 | http://kezastore.com |
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