The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

THE Bahamas’ second mobile provider yesterday unveiled its partnership with Mobile Assist, the mobile application providing directory services and engagement between businesses and their customers.

Damian Blackburn, Aliv’s chief executive, hailed the move as the “start of the digital revolution in the Bahamas”, noting that the deal will ensure the Mobile Assist app is loaded on to all of the operator’s smar tphones.

“We will be encouraging Aliv users, using our digital marketing resources, to download this app and use it. We will encourage all of Aliv’s small and large business customers to adopt all of the functionality in this App as soon as possible. This is the start of the digital revolution in the Bahamas,” said Mr Blackburn.

Mobile Assist is a trademark of CBI Mobile Bahamas. The Mobile Assist app, which is hosted in the Amazon Cloud, allows companies and organisations to interact with their customers on many levels via a single integrated interface that has been downloaded 30,000 times since its soft launch 12 months ago.

Dr Donovan Moxey, president and co-founder of CBI Mobile Bahamas, said: “We’re excited for this opportunity to partner with Aliv.

“We have been working with Aliv now for several months. We released the new form of the Mobile Assist app several weeks ago, and we are very excited about the possibilities.

“The Mobile Assist app is a directory services application platform, and presently it has over 10,400 business listed in the app and that makes up about 19,000 different listing categories. We believe we have the most comprehensive mobile application listing in the Bahamas.”

Beyond its directory feature, Mobile Assist allows mobile engagement between businesses and their customers. “We provide for notifications, mobile commerce, specifically bill payments, donations, the distribution of coupons, video, news content and weather. The Mobile Assist app allows you to have the Bahamas at your finger tips,” said Dr Moxey.

“One of the things we are excited about is the fact that we are a platform that allows businesses to intelligently map out their mobile strategy when it comes to customer engagement. We allow them to send out notifications based on the demographic profiles which they are targeting. We also have the ability for them to shape customer behaviour in sending notices or coupons using what we call our geo-fencing feature.”

This feature, Dr Moxey explained, activates when customers are in the vicinity of a store or shopping centre, and alerts them on what activities may be happening in the area.

“We call it next generation mobile engagement. All of the communication and transactional functionality one would expect in a mobile application is available with Mobile Assist,” he added.

Dr Moxey said that while the Bahamas has been the entry market for Mobile Assist, the app has been downloaded in countries such as France, Canada, the US and Jamaica.