At nine o’clock tonight, nearly 700 Orange and T-Mobile stores will close. By the morning they will all have been refitted and rebranded and will open under the EE fascia selling EE, Orange and T-Mobile products and, of course, LTE.
As the company readied itself for the relaunch, Mobile Europe grabbed a quick chat with Marc Allera, Chief of Sales, EE, at London’s Oxford Street Store, which has already had its refit.
On the store refits and move to EE:
(Marc Allera) “We're closing pretty much all of our stores today at 9pm in order to get them ready, because they've got to have a complete facelift inside and a little bit outside as well. We've got the systems going into the stores, those are being tested so that they [the sales staff] can sell all three brands. Historically we had Orange stores selling Orange only and T-Mobile selling T-Mobile only, and now all of these EE stores can sell all three brands.
“We have invested £35 million this year not just in the store design but in the systems and we spent few million on training, because a key part of our proposition is that we want our people to be seen as the most friendly, knowledgeable experts on the high street. We’ve been training our people to become more knowledgeable in Android, Windows Phone, iOS and Blackberry; that's a journey for these guys in the next 12-18 months because we want to get them to a great level, but that takes time. We’ve trained about 5,000 people across 700 stores, which is our whole direct footprint.”
Do you think you've given the staff in the shops the right tools to go to market?
“I think so. First of all they’ve got something no-one else has got, no-one else is offering 4G. Secondly its five times faster than you get today, and we offer customers peace of mind because they can't go over their data allowances so nobody is going to get a nasty surprise. And we offer a range of plans from 500Mb at entry level to 8Gb at higher level, so there’s something for everyone and we believe that's more than enough for everyone out there.”
Do you think once people start using LTE, they’ll get through more data than on 4G, because they watch more video, say, because it’s a much better experience.
“We'll have to see. What we do know at the moment is that a lot of the research say, ‘I want to use it because it's faster and it might get me some time back in my life, rather than file up that time with more usage.’ We'll have to see, the service goes live tomorrow and we'll get a very clear indication of how people are using it pretty quickly.”
If you could put yourself in Vodafone’s shoes, who don’t have your advantage. What did you make of their offer to trade in 70% of their customers’ remaining 3G contracts, if they commit to upgrade to 4G. Do you think that was a smart thing to have done?
“It’s up to them to advertise what they do and create their own propositions. We're very focussed on what we're doing. We’re launching 4G to 11 citrus, rebranding 700 sites and we have got a huge multi-million pound advertising campaign showing live at the weekend. We've got more than enough for us to be focussed on without worrying what everyone else is up to.”
The Clone Phone and WiFi integration and other value-adds seem interesting…
“… and Film Service as well, which takes [Orange Wednesdays] and makes it better. You get a film on us every week — we think we've got a film catalogue that's five times bigger than Love Film for example. And that’s the thing when you get into inevitable critiques of price plans it's not just about unlimited calls and texts and data, you're getting all these other benefits as well.”
We hear a lot about changes to data pricing strategies, with operators considering value based plans, QoS based plans, shared plans. Do you see that you can move into different ways of addressing some of those areas?
“Obviously tomorrow’s day one: now I’m sure that as technology evolves our pricing and tariffing will evolve. We are offering shared plans to business, and that's very very popular…very popular on Orange with Connected as well, where customers can share data between iPad and iPhone. So I think the sharer concept looks to be here to stay and then as we get more and more evolution in terms of our technical roadmap into the network and our billing systems we can look at things like QoS and speed charging as well.
"Family plans have been very popular in the US, so we'll have to see, but at the moment we think we have got enough.”
About the stores:
The store is decorated in a slate grey tone, with EE’s blue and yellow branding to the fore. The Orange and T-Mobile brands are integrated on the 3G devices that are available, with EE showcased in the LTE demo section.
Each member of staff has been given a specialism – so they might be “experts” in a certain OS or in 4G in general. The shop has a PAYG side and a side divided up by OS – WP, iOS, Android and Blackberry.
We spoke to three members of staff – who have themselves been given new livery. All of them said that customers tend to be much more knowledgeable these days. They come in having done their research, and have a fair idea of what they want. There are also customers coming in to be educated. Both sorts of customer require a high level of knowledge from the staff.
Do the sales staff think they have the tools to sell 4G? The store manager was positive that just the 4G experience would do much of the job, especially while no-one else has 4G in the UK. He also thought the tariffs that had been designed were well-matched to consumer needs, and didn’t think he’d have any problems selling them to his customers.
As for performance, the speed test we were shown showed latency of 42mS, uplink of 11Mbps and a downlink throughput of 58Mbps – in what were probably near-optimum conditions, being at the front of the store and sited in a cell in which the test device was probably the only active device at that moment. But it’s always stunning for a user, used to 3G speeds, to see web pages render almost instantly and streaming videos play with a one second pause.