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Vivian Chang PRT 4828
What is Teltrust? • Teltrustused to be a payphone company, but later on it became a carrier. Teltrust has been in the Hospitality Industry for the past 30 years. Originally supplied pay telephone services and equipment to many of the largest hotel chains in the U.S. and provided long distance services. Although the telecommunication industry has change remarkably over the past 10 years, Teltrust has maintained their relationship and now provides international and long distance calls for the hotels as well as products.
We found a Need! • Teltrustdiscovered collect calls were used less frequently and were quickly diminishing, collect calls were still being made but through the bank system only. Teltrust needed to figure out how they could still keep their customers, and at the same time correspond with the banks. Teltrust created a new structure and needed to market, and create a website to advertise their new product they created named, Travel Call.
What is Travel Call? • There’s a need in the industry to be able to call the US when you are traveling over seas. Most of the people don’t really know how because if you call it the wrong way it can be really expensive especially if you are using cell phones. What we did is we developed product where users can call home while traveling abroad using your cell phone for free. Because we’ve been in the collect call billing industry for many years, we decided that we would give users free minutes if they would make a call first to the bank back in the US. Cause we also discovered the bank is also willing to give out collect numbers to call for free. The banks want people to call them when they are traveling. We show the person who’s traveling over seas to use the free minutes that we offered to call back. They also get a hold of bank that pays us for the call. Because they are using our product, we become the carrier to bill. The app is already in our network, so when they call from our app to the bank, we then become the carrier.
Main Roles at Teltrust • To help development for a new product named, Travel Call. • Assist in creating an app to help advertise the products and its capabilities. • Create a website for Teltrust’s products. • Help design and create a website that we can market to multiple travel agencies online. • Use what I learned in online marketing from Linda Ralston’s class, such as, creating a website customized with the skills I have learned. For example; using Photoshop to make a professional looking website. • Using the skills I have developed through experience and applying them on a daily basis and in my future careers.
Goals and Objectives • My main goal for this internship is to explore career paths within the hospitality industry to see what area I would feel most comfortable working in. • Learning more about Marketing is something that I always wanted to try. This semester I got my internship at Teltrust in marketing. • I also want to make sure I am challenged in the work I am tasked to do on a daily basis to ensure my learning. • Another one of my goals was to be able to be more open and express my feelings to others more easily.
How I meet my goals.. • With my internship at Teltrust, I have been working closely with their marketing department in order for me to understand and learn what role marketing plays within a company. • I have built good relationships with each employee with both companies. I believe that this has helped me be more comfortable in expressing my feelings and ideas. • Having the mindset try new things and don’t let anything hold me back, has helped me make sure I am challenged in my daily tasks. • Last semester, I was a intern at Gossip Tapioca as a manager. With the addition of interning at Teltrust and working at Little America, I feel I a getting a well rounded experience about different career paths within the hospitality industry.
How do we market the product? • TeltrustIs currently working on new marketing projects that they feel will help them grow as a company. • We developed an app for Apple’s app store for use on their iPhones to see how this will help the company. We are currently waiting apples to approved our finished app to be released still. • We just finished developing a website. We used our personal contacts to provide feedback on what they thought of it. if it was easy to understand about the product and interesting. • The website URL is www.travelcall.com
I learned in marketing you would want to use samples. I use my friends as the samples such and show them examples of how the website would look like throughout the whole process. If its easy to understand the product, easy to read, and interesting, we will proceed to the next project on the website. We changed features based on their opinions and questions. All of these little things matterin making sure we have a very successful website.
Another way that we trying to market our product is to send a postcard with a travel packet to international travelers. The postcard would explain more details about Travel Call and our app. A few of the travel agencies we have been talking to are Da Fa travel, Great Adventure Travel, and Wasatch Travel. I have been researching about different travel agencies that might work the best for our company. Since our products are targeting travellers from other countries, we need to make sure we approach travel agencies that provide their services for other countries as well as the United States.
I also come up with another idea trying to get Travel Call listed higher up in search engines. But as right now, we decided not to because we are afraid that it will grow too fast. If we get too many customers too fast and we are not able to support a large volume of customers. It will created negative feedback as customers will not have the experience we intended them to have. you have to have so much capacity to handle all those calls, and it cost a lot of money to build it out to have additional servers and such. What I learned is what you don’t want to do is build up a huge server, huge capacity to handle that cause you don’t even know if it’s going to work. Its better to start slow, and then build up. It is important to not invest too much into something when you do no t know what the results will be.
What did I learned in marketing? • In marketing, there’s is a not a set way to do things. There’s not a right or wrong way as well. Many times you have to talk with a lot of people for samples to see what works. It’s kind of like a fluid processes rather than just a fix. In school, they teach you to fix things, but in reality when you are actually doing it its more like a fluid process. Cause you try something, you think it works but it doesn’t, so you’ll have to come up with a plan B. In reality, you have to keep changing, give out samples and if it doesn’t work you have to be creative and again do samples and change to make it fit for everyone. That’s part of the reason it took me awhile to design the website. • I also learned to be creative. If the website is too long and boring, people will lose interest and will just leave the page. • I learned its different in class, because there really is not a right way to do this. When you market, every product is unique and everyone thinks differently, and also its all about who you are targeting to. • In marketing you do a lot of sampling. The goal is to spend money if that money works. You don’t ever just dump lots of money into a project. you don’t even know if its going to work and this is why we do samples. For example, when people do television apps, they would first release a test market to run the app to see how it goes. If it goes well then they’ll put in millions of dollars more to expend nation wide. • Gary always told me it’s like when you go to a lake, you don’t just jump right in to the water,you always put your toe in first to see how cold it is. Same thing as business, you always want to test it out before you go in full blast. Try to spend little as possible when you do samples.
Overall, I think Its fascinating to see a real product being developed in real life. when I’m involved to be part of it. I’m still surprised that I designed the website all by myself. The website took me a long time because we had to keep testing it. Constantly changing and having people sample the website was a long process. This has been a wonderful experience for me, not only have I learned so much about marketing, this experience also helped me with my communication skills. I’m not as shy around people as I have been before. Because of that experience I have built a good relationship with all my coworkers at Little America. Now I know I have connections to get around because of that. I’m sad that this internship has come to a end. I am, However, excited that I am now an employee at Teltrust.
