I'm standing here today with Will Gibson. Hello. Vice President of Retail for Cable & Wireless Communications. We're standing inside the all-new Flow store experience, and we're going to have a dialogue about the process, the steps that have led up to the creation of this great store and our relationship together. So Will, can you give us a brief overview of Cable & Wireless Communications and Flow? What is the Flow brand? So at Cable & Wireless, we're a full quad play carrier operator. We have three businesses, one in Bahamas, which is BTC, one in Panama, which is Cable & Wireless Panama, and in the Caribbean, due to our recent merger with Columbus, we took on the brand name of Flow, replacing the old Lime. So we're in that transition, and in the Caribbean, we really needed to bring Flow to life and relaunch it, and so that's why the retail experience was certainly part of that.
So what were the challenges that you had to overcome in creating this Flow experience in this Flow retail environment? So the challenge for the mobile landscape across the Caribbean is one of basic 20 years of legacy, 20 years of basic monopoly. And then in the last five to 10 years, the market really opened up from a pricing perspective. But the challenge with the Caribbean and the diverse nature of the geography means that you have so many different islands, you have so many different proud individual countries, that the governance sometimes and getting consistency across can be a challenge. From the retail perspective, we're obviously getting to grips with the new brand and relaunching Flow and bringing that to certain markets that had never seen Flow before. In some markets, Flow and Lime had existed side by side. In some markets, like Cayman Islands, for instance, there was only Lime, so Flow
was new. So what did that brand mean? And from a retail perspective, our stores were very old. The experience was old-fashioned. It was more akin to a bank or a post office, and it was go there to pay your bill and go there to seek some customer service. Now, obviously, with the changing landscape and the digital world that today is, we wanted to bring a very first-world retail experience to the Caribbean, and we wanted to make the retail experience more about come and experience what our products and services can do to enhance your life, rather than, "Here is our place of operation. Come talk to us. Come pay your bills." So Will, maybe next we can talk about the goals and objectives for the project and what you were hoping to achieve. So my goal for this project was to really bring a first-world, cutting-edge retail telco design to the Caribbean. But then obviously, the main retail objectives exist. The challenge when you want to go
experiential and digital in retail is, how do you swallow the cost of all of this equipment against what you're driving and delivering from a sales perspective in-store? And that is a challenge because we had to free that channel up. As I said before, the store journey was about bill payment and was about customer service. It wasn't necessarily about upgrading your handset or buying an accessory, or buying a tablet. We didn't even sell some of those categories. So, we had to set some very clear KPIs around what the return was going to be. And also, we had to be very diligent in terms of what the environment would cost. But that still didn't mean that we could just blow a million dollars on every single store. We obviously had a cost consciousness there, and we had to make sure that our ambitions reflected the reality of the economics and demographics in the region. And we managed to achieve that, and what you see here,
we've managed to produce at a level which hit our targets of cost. So that was great. Could you now maybe talk a little bit about the process that you took to achieve these goals and what that journey looked like? Yeah. So the process was really on a number of multiple different levels. Obviously, working with Shigetani Lacroix from the beginning on the ideation and design was a real, I would say, fun process. We started with a blank sheet of paper, and we were guided towards various different levels of execution and ambition. And some of which, actually, some of the early iterations really kind of stretched the boundaries of what was possible and was all kind of uber Caribbean and music and almost carnival every day. And from that, we were able to then, through a solid series of research, pull all of those together and really come up with something that not only was new and digital and experiential, but
certainly in the look and feel was Caribbean. One of the challenges with Flow as a brand being blue is that if you only put blue and shades of in a retail environment, the store can look very cold. So, through the research, we really got an understanding that color was very important to the Caribbean, so hence us using the secondary color palettes to really drive some kind of fun areas of the store. And then from there is, once we got the design done, we took our time and went into a solid period of prototyping. And we worked with some of our millwork vendors. We worked with some of our other- technology partners to really see how everything could fit and could that design work in reality. And I think that part of the process, the secondary process, was very fulfilling because it meant we were able to hit the ground running. And certainly, that's why we're in this location right now, which
we call our Miami retail lab. This was the place where we built the first versions, and pretty close to the final versions, of all of the furniture, and we put it in and we said, "Does this work?" And so making sure that Shigetani helped us with all stages of that process and really held our hands through it was, A, very rewarding, but, B, meant that we were able to have a project that hit the ground running. We didn't do a store and then have to go back and say, "This doesn't work, that doesn't work, this doesn't work." It was very well fleshed out from the beginning. So maybe now we can talk about how you've changed that brand perception, that brand experience around the Flow store, and talk a little bit about the brand transformation as well. So the brand transformation and the story of moving from Lime to Flow in the Caribbean is actually quite a long one. It began in November 2014, and
still as of March 2016, is not quite completed. There are a few of our markets that haven't flipped over for various regulatory reasons. But we started our journey in Barbados, which is one of our biggest markets. And the brand transformation really happened overnight and across a weekend with a lot of launch activities. But in every market where we've combined the brands or we've flipped from single Lime to single Flow, we've tried to bring the retail experience as part of that brand transformation. So it's about saying to the customers, "Who you previously knew as Lime has changed, and we have completely changed, and we are now Flow. So here is your new product catalog. Here are our new values. Here is how we're going to do business with you." But actually, retail is a very tangible place where you can show customers how you're different. So able to open a fantastic, beautiful environment like this that is able to
showcase our full range of devices that are for sale live, that is able to bring accessories to the markets in a way that we've never done before live. You can interact with speakers here. You can interact with tablets. You can buy the Gear watch, the Fitbits. That was a way that helped cement our brand transformation because we were able to physically show this is how we're different, and it was very well received. So Will, there's a lot of digital interaction, a lot of digital immersive in terms of the experience here. Could you talk a little bit about the role of digital in the store in terms of the customer journey and customer engagement? So our commitment to digital from the outset was absolute. We knew we wanted to move away from traditional paper, away from traditional poster frames in stores and in the windows and so on, so forth. And we wanted to, through our use of the screens and the
technology, showcase our brand, showcase what's possible, and showcase what's cool in a really immersive way. So working with the team at Shigetani to produce all of the moving images that replace our brochures, replace our flyers that clutter up and then get thrown away, was key. And we wanted the customer to use the technology in a way that helped their journey. If they were browsing around the store environment, what is the latest campaign and are they able to see that? Can they see some of the prepaid rates? Can they use some of the technology in a branded way to look at the products and services that are right for their needs? And this is a great example of where this type of product can be an alone journey, so customers are invited to touch themselves and explore. Or it can be a joint hosted journey where the advisor will ask the right questions and use the technology to demonstrate to the
customer what is going to be right for them. So we are really delighted with the quality of the digital experiences in store. It's very, very well branded. It speaks the right tone. It talks about our products and our services, and I think immerses the customer into our environment so that when they walk in, they're kind of like, "Wow, this is cool. This is something I want to do. This is a company I want to do business with." And that's actually borne out by the fact that one of our KPIs was to bring our competitor customers into stores. Because typically, in the past, that didn't happen. And what we find now through monitoring of SIMs that come in and people who connect to our Wi-Fi network is that roughly about 10% of our customers actually are our competitor customers. So that's enabling us to meet our business objectives through the digital journey. So in addition, how is digital being leveraged to
greet the customer? How are the customer's expectations being met when they come into the store and they're looking at waiting times or being directed to the right department? From the beginning, when a customer comes in from the queuing station, the customer is triaged to the right area of the store. And that reduces wait time, it reduces frustrations so that the customer who has a five-minute help and advice quick query is not stuck behind three people with long bill payment queries in store. So the queuing system and the way we've integrated that, again, into the technology around the store has been really well received because subliminally By showing the queue menus on the screens and having them bounce around, it's encouraging the customers to move and experience different parts of the store, and we found that a real plus. Other parts of the technology that help the journey are things like the bill
payment kiosks that have really sped up that experience. So, now you don't have to wait for a person and give them your money. You can be in and out in less than 60 seconds at the front of our store. And one of the other experiences was the charge-up station. We have this now beautiful, secure cabinet where customers can store their phone and continue about their transaction and then go get it, and they've had a big boost to the power of their device. And we're finding that, again, that's driving competitor customers inside, because it's a free service for everybody in that community, not just for our customers. So it's a great way for us to say out loud, I guess, to everybody that, "Come be a part of us and our story because we care about you as a consumer, and we want to help you as much as possible." So, the whole digital experience in totality has really brought, I think, the store experience
together and helped us hit our objectives. Will, could you expand a little bit on the store performance and some of those metrics and measurements that you're using to describe how the store experience has been elevated and differentiated? Yeah. So the rebranding has been a big success in terms of our perception as a business. Lime being a near 10-year-old brand in the region, had suffered from some negative associations, so we were able to kind of sweep those away with the change to Flow and also the improvement in a number of parts of our business, like contact centers and overall customer service initiatives, as well as retail. So our net promoter score has increased, and we've met our objectives handsomely for the year. In terms of retail, we were actually in a negative position in our previous old legacy stores. On NPS, our customers say they were in stores too long, queue times were bad, experience was poor,
and they couldn't often get the answers to the questions that they had. So now we've actually seen, I hesitate to say it a little bit, but it's true, a kind of a quantum leap in our NPS, in that most of our markets now are in a positive for retail, and particularly when we're able to pin that down to a market that only really has one flagship store, and I'll give you a great example, is Dominica. We took that market from minus 24 on NPS to plus 20. That is a huge swing, and as a result, that also had impacts on the sales objectives at Christmas, market share we were able to gain. So, the retail environment now has given us a real weapon to really attack our competitor and welcome their customers and gain share as a result. And at the same time, people who are customers of ours are now thanking us and doing more business with us, upgrading their handsets, buying accessories, buying more products like TV and broadband,
because they are delighted with the experience, and we look after them when they come into this beautiful store environment. So this has been a great process and one that we're very happy to be a part of. Have you got any advice for other brands or individuals looking to change their customer experience, their customer engagement, and that customer immersion that you've talked to? A retail brand transformation will touch every aspect of the business. It will touch what happens in your customer service ambitions and your contact centers, if you have them. It will touch your brand and needs to speak to your brand, and as a result, it needs to be everybody's project. So very early on in this project, we engaged our IT brothers, we engaged our marketing department and our brand team, we engaged our customer service team, and we made this transformation their product and enabled everybody to have input.
I think the other piece of advice I would give is, don't just be a me too. If you're doing this transformation, you're obviously spending good money on this project. You need to get a return. So don't just settle for what is the same and that you've seen before, but you kind of think looks good. Think beyond that to the next phase. I think my advice would definitely be, set your bar high, and be different. Because in today's digital world of speed and everything always on all the same time, how you stand out from the crowd is going to get you attention. Being the same is not. So they would be my two pieces of advice. So thank you for joining us today, Will. Thank you so much. It's been a great journey. Thanks for- Absolute pleasure. Yeah. Thank you for allowing us to be a part of it. We invite you all to stick around, and we'll be answering questions in a few minutes.
