CMPak, more commonly known as Zong is a subsidiary of China Mobile ─ the largest mobile telecommunications company in the world. Zong started its operations in Pakistan in the year 2008 and despite the fact it was the last one to enter the market, now it stands on the 3rd position with more than 28 million customers.
The day before yesterday, Zong has invited Bloggers and Journalists from the Tech & Fashion industry to visit the company headquarters in Islamabad. The guests including myself traveled from Lahore, Karachi and Rawalpindi to visit the Zong Cloud Complex in Chak Shahzad Islamabad.
In this tour Zong provided the chance for digital opinion leaders to experience the working environment and culture of the Chinese subsidiary and interact with the employees. We were allowed to roam freely in the complex and even take pictures of the employees and ask them for a selfie. Interestingly, everyone was working in a similar kind of environment ─ managers, assistants, officers and trainees, they were all working together. There was plenty of interesting stuff, including restrooms, day care center and a mosque.
The Zong complex also houses the largest cloud based contact center in the country. It has more than 500 seats and usually get 3000 to 7000 calls in an hour. The company is focusing on all the market segments and wishes to become the market leader through customer satisfaction.
Executive Director Marketing, Babar Bajwa and his team also provided some insights on the company and shared the future plans including the launch of 4G services in Pakistan. Zong was the only operator in the 3G and 4G license auction, which secured both licenses and plans to launch 4G service in the major cities very soon. It merits mentioning here that Zong 3G services are already up and running in 8 cities and will expand to more areas very soon.
Though we were expecting to become the beta testers of Zong 4G but sadly we were not provided with 4G SIMs or any demonstration. However as per Sheldon Godinho, Senior Manager PR at Zong ─ the 4G service is currently in the test phase at the headquarters and the company is planning to launch it very soon in three major cities, Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore.
Well no 4G for now, but all of the guests were issued Zong 3G SIMS through the newest portable biometric machines. The procedure is quite simple, you just have to show your CNIC and give a thumb impression and there you go. It takes less than 5 minutes to get a new SIM.
I and my team and grateful to Zong for providing us a chance to visit their headquarters and get to know more about the company and its culture. We’re also obliged to Syntax Communications for their hospitality as it was a memorable tour.
We hope to learn more about Zong 4G in the next couple of days, so keep checking back and hopefully we’ll able to give your more information on the subject. Here are some of the pictures from this tour:
