Telstra poster
A man and power lines are reflected in a Telstra poster adorning a public telephone in Sydney, Australia, August 13, 2015. Australian telecoms giant Telstra Corp Ltd on Thursday posted a 1 percent slide in full-year net profit, in line with expectations, and forecast modest earnings growth in the current year. Reuters/David Gray

Telecom giant Telstra is all set to compete with Apple, Microsoft and HP with the launch of its new retail flagship store in Melbourne on Monday.

The retail store “Discovery,” from interior design firm Geyer, is situated at the corner of Swanston and Bourke streets in Melbourne Central, which is an evolving shopping hub. The store will bring to the customers an array of collections, including Crumple bags, tech accessories, tablets, PCs, home controllers, security cameras and health-related monitors. The store, which has a standard white interior, will also offer interactive boutique with an in-store barista to provide free coffee to customers.

The store’s interactive premise has tap and take facility with high-resolution touch tables where the customers can see the details about a device just at a touch. Telstra is planning to introduce this facility to all its company-owned stores.

“Our team of highly trained experts is dedicated to providing the best in personalised service for our customers. This is supported by the very latest innovations in digital technology that allow customers to seamlessly switch between physical and digital experiences as they explore, discover, try and buy,” Telstra Country Wide General Managing Director Andrew Coull said in his statement .

“Today, more than half of our service transactions are digital and so it’s important we provide our customers the choice of when, where and how they interact with us,” he said.

The company believes that the new retail “icon” store will attract around 5,000 customers in a day in the wake of Christmas, which is double the store traffic generated in the traditional type of stores. Telstra would not unveil the amount of expenditure incurred in its new retail outlet. Coull said that the initiatives experimented successfully in this retail store would be implemented across the Telstra network.

Tech analyst Steven Noble said that Telstra was working on increasing the “Internet of things” to a major extent, which will very soon indicate most of the home appliances linked online. “We have forecast the Internet of things at home to grow 11-fold by 2019,” he claimed as quoted by the Sydney Morning Herald .

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