AT&T is acquiring critical about retail with the opening of a flagship store in Chicago. Photo: Courtesy of AT&T
Considering that everyone started utilizing mobile phones, the mission of all individuals AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile storefronts has been to sign up consumers. And it’s worked magnificently. Virtually everyone who wants a cell phone now has a single — “100% penetration” in the parlance of telecom geeks. The query now for the retail specialists at the nation’s wireless carriers is what new goal can all that high-priced genuine estate serve?
AT&T’s new flagship retailer, which opens today along Chicago’s tony Michigan Avenue, gives 1 answer. The style and function of the 10,000-square-foot space — and the thinking behind it — speak to how our bond with our phones has changed in the final two decades, and exactly where the earnings of these enormous wireless organizations will come from next. It’s less about promoting you the subsequent handset, and a lot more about selling you on an expertise.
If you are like most buyers of the nation’s second-biggest wireless carrier, your existing relationship with AT&T is largely economic. You pay them every single month, and sometimes you shake your fist at the sky when a contact is dropped and curse the day you had your heart set on an iPhone. From the moment you stroll into the Michigan Avenue store, the experience is meant to start off altering that hardened, transactional relationship.
The clear retail model to adhere to would have been the Apple’s, but Paul Roth, AT&T’s president of retail sales and service, says he didn’t commence with their longtime partner when initially sketching out the multimillion-dollar store. “Our beginning point wasn’t, who is the ideal retailer?” Roth says, “but who has the greatest buyer service?” Roth and his group spent time with Harley Davidson, Ritz Carlton, Starbucks and Nordstrom to see what they could understand. “Our business has nothing at all to do with coffee or motorcycles. We were trying to recognize how to create that sort of customer loyalty.”
Clearly client service is one particular of the crucial lessons. As you stroll into the 40-employee retailer, workers have been instructed to walk up to you within ten feet and ten seconds, introduce themselves and then ask your name — a Nordstrom flair. As you scan the reclaimed teak interior, let’s say you want to know exactly where they’ve stashed the latest tablets. Stealing a web page from Ritz Carlton, an employee will escort you there — by no means point the way, that would be uncivilized — and support you get started.
Whether or not you’re there to basically spend a bill, ogle new phones or the compare latest tech for in-vehicle communication and home security, an employee walks you to the door to send you off when you’re carried out.
“It’s like they had been a guest in your home,” says Roth. “We think the future of good results in retail is when you can create an emotional, engaging knowledge. That’s what we are attempting to do here.”
Roth acknowledges that “emotional and engaging” is probably not the way most people would describe their expertise with a go to to an AT&T shop (crowded and bland are two words that come to thoughts). “It’s evolving,” is all he would say when asked to characterize what it is like now.
Roth’s point is that AT&T knows there is a great deal it can enhance upon, and it’s producing a huge work to alter how its stores look and really feel. And there is a enormous quantity at stake. Even though you may possibly feel absolutely everyone just buys their gear online, the retailers are nonetheless AT&T’s biggest sales channel for hardware, according to Roth.
It is the application on display, nevertheless, that hints at where the future lies, not just for AT&T, but every carrier.
The retailer is divided into distinct regions that focus on getting the most out of your gear at property, in the course of operate, for entertainment, and in your auto. In each and every zone, workers with particular locations of knowledge support you with the most recent software and services for your smartphone or tablet. A fitness section characteristics Fitbit’s exercising tracking gizmo and a wireless scale. An all-electric Nissan leaf attributes a prototype service that can track the speed, place and driving style of your teenage drivers.
Are there phones and tablets? Confident, but they aren’t the stars anymore—it’s what you can do with them as they wedge themselves into every single aspect of our lives that matters. That is Roth’s aim with the new Chicago shop: to support AT&T build a connection with consumers that tends to make the wireless carrier a continual in their lives, a beneficial resource in all factors mobile and wireless. The flagship store is the highest expression of that intent, and even though its teak and glass design won’t be exported to the two,300 other AT&T stores, the strategy will be, he says, including the emphasis on your whole digital life and a new standard for client service.
Will that translate to an emotional, engaging encounter? Perhaps, particularly if superior consumer service becomes a distinct element of what going to an AT&T store is all about. A warm, genuine greeting, and an escort in lieu of a pointed finger can make any encounter far better. Even paying your phone bill.
