Maplewave Greeting, Queueing & Sales Assist - Digicel

Summary

With a strong leadership position in the Caribbean, Digicel wanted to improve its retail customer experience in light of newly opened competitor stores. Digicel’s relationship with Maplewave was well-established; they became a customer in 2012 and had operations together in over 20 markets. Maplewave was the natural choice.

Bio

Digicel is a mobile phone network provider based out of Kingston, Jamaica. Since its inception in 2001, Digicel now operates in 31 markets across the Caribbean, Central America, and Oceania regions. They have 14 million wireless users and are one of the largest providers in the Caribbean market.

Their mission is to deliver the best network, the best service, and the best value to their customers and to give back to their communities.

Digicel is owned by Irish entrepreneur, Denis O’Brien.

Pain Points

In 2017, several of Digicel’s markets were affected by frequent hurricanes, and some stores needed to be rebuilt. They quickly recognized that this setback could be an opportunity to transform and improve their in-store customer experience. Digicel wanted to move its in-store experience beyond simple transactions, and instead create a memorable experience that would translate to brand loyalty.

Digicel targeted a few specific areas where they needed to improve:

• Address footfall overload during peak times.
• Control the store environment and move sales conversations away from the back-store counters.
• Deploy the latest technologies as a sales aid for their staff.
• Streamline store processes and gather valuable analytics from their customer traffic.

Challenges

Integrating Maplewave’s Greeting & Queueing and Sales Assist solutions into the rest of Digicel’s tech stack was a real effort, which was made easier by the great collaboration between Maplewave and the Digicel IT team.

It was critical that data could be easily recalled from many systems in a fast, real-time manner. This speed was also required in areas that could sometimes suffer from fixed-line network challenges, and even some short outages from time to time. Digicel needed a system that was fast and reliable.

Ensuring that the solutions were mapped to Digicel’s customer-centric strategy was also vital, and a lot of thought and discussion was put in place to understand exactly how customers AND staff alike could use the system’s many features to their advantage.

The Solution

The earlier deployment of Maplewave’s Point of Sale was the key steppingstone towards deploying these tablet-based solutions, as it was already performing a key role in retail transactions in-store.

The solutions were tested in the various markets that had already started using Maplewave’s POS. It was a huge success with all parties, and Maplewave was asked to deploy these solutions to the soon-to-be-opened stores in Guyana and the British Virgin Islands.

Maplewave’s Greeting & Queuing solution measures customer traffic through its queue function and frees staff from the counter with the Sales Assist solution. Speaking at the launch event in Guyana, Digicel’s CEO, Gregory Dean, had this to say; “This will significantly reduce wait times, provide a flexible shopping experience, and greatly increase the quality of service we are able to offer”.

In the British Virgin Islands, CEO Kevin Gordon explained; “We are ensuring that when you come in, you don’t just speak with someone, but you get served. You also have an experience with Digicel, so everything you have here is aligned with our customer-centric experience.”

Results

Digicel customers and staff alike were delighted with the new experience. One BVI customer described the new service as “exceptional” and continued; “I believe it is a new beginning in the BVI. I think it is something that has been long waiting to be born. The service is excellent. I believe Digicel changed the whole game in the BVI, and I have been one of the beneficiaries.”

Early analysis of the sales conversion rates is underway, and the ROI of the system has already been proven by delighted Digicel executives.

Conclusion

Maplewave’s Greeting & Queueing and Sales Assist solutions helped Digicel take back control of their footfall and empowered their retail staff to control the transaction from the moment customers entered the store.