Telstra retail transformation

GM, Retail Innovation, Design and Merchandising

2015 - 2017

Telstra

Telstra is Australia’s number 1 Telco, with $30b+ revenue per year and 30,000 employees.

Context: the Telco market is evolving extremely fast. Products, services and buying behaviours have evolved drastically in the last decade, yet, Telstra stores haven’t in 8 years.

Problem: There is a need for a new retail model that is better adapted to customer’s always on buying behaviours, as well as a new connected store blueprint that plays an important role in Telstra omni-channel ecosystem.

Solution: a 2.5 years innovation program led by my team (Retail) in collaboration with Product, Marketing, Brand, Telstra Digital as well as external partners (Google, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Cisco). We started by looking at our customer’s path to purchase, and the role of each of our channels, in order to build a new connected omni-channel ecosystem that adapts to shopping behaviours. We then came up with a new connected store design blueprint that we tested and improved before it was rolled out at scale.

Results: Telstra ‘store of the future’ is the result of more than 2.5 years of design, research, prototyping, technology trial and testing (we hired more than 200 real customers and 50 Telstra staff to test the prototype environment). It is now being rolled out at scale throughout Australia. On top of improving on all metrics (digitisation, sales, NPS), we managed to reduce the cost per sqm by 30%.

The new Telstra Store have received the Retail Design of the Year award in 2019 by the very well respected Inside Retail magazine.