Ever received a random text message, from a random service asking you to subscribe for a fee? Worse, have you ever received those annoying texts, that without shame charge you and proceed to gobble up all your airtime? I am a victim of these two circumstances and I know many others who have undergone the same issues. The one thing most users complain about is that they do not quite remember subscribing to these services. In other instances, one just receives an SMS from certain service provider marketing their services, for which you are not the target market or could care least about. Problem is users cannot unsubscribe from these services easily or even know how to unsubscribe from them without contacting their mobile service providers.
Safaricom being the largest mobile service provider locally has had its customers receive these messages. Subsequently, the users raise issue over the disappearing of their airtime with others seeking to be ultimately unsubscribed from the service. Ideally, the process involved dialing *100# on Prepay and *200# on Post pay. One gets a list of options as seen above, select Premium Rate Services. Inside Premium Services, users would select My Subscriptions and this would list all the Premium services you are subscribed and one would then unsubscribe to each or all of them.
Safaricom has now done the heavy lifting eliminating the USSD prompts by allowing the user to easily unsubscribe from the service from the message itself. The messages from the service providers are accompanied by a tail message that tells the users from which premium number they would unsubscribe. In the above photo, a user can easily unsubscribe by clicking on the number issued after the stop message and send a message asking to unsubscribe. Not only is the process easier and efficient but gives the customer the choice of either retaining or opting out of receiving such content.
