Telenor India has announced that it has improved its record of launching the maximum number of stores in a single day. Telenor opened 472 stores simultaneously across six circles on 26 August, 2015 and bettered its own Guinness Book record of opening 362 stores in 2014. Last week Guinness Book of World Records certified Telenor India for “Most Stores Launched Simultaneously”.
With this new record, Telenor India has become the only company in the world to have the distinction of achieving largest store expansion twice in two consecutive years.
Telenor identified areas where the subscriber base was about 10,000 customers but there were no stores within a radius of 4 kilometres. It was estimated that it needed to open over 472 stores to fill this gap, however, an expansion of this scale would have required at least 2 years. On 26 August, 2015 the opening of 472 stores was the largest and fastest expansion of retail stores in a single day. It took 110 days of planning, 2640 man hours of execution involving 180 employees across its 6 operating circles.
On this occasion, Upanga Dutta, Chief Marketing Officer, Telenor India said, “An expansion of this scale would take months in normal course. But by accelerating the process, Telenor has successfully gone deeper with its retail footprint across its markets in one stroke. With the increased reach and availability of Telenor products and services, it will help us fulfill our strategic ambition of being ‘Loved by Customers’.”
Telenor India has one of the largest retail network in the telecom sector with 392,000 point of sales and the addition of these 472 stores takes the overall exclusive retail footprint of Telenor to over 2070 stores. This vast network of retail stores is supported by an in-house automated distribution management system. The DMS gives a competitive edge to Telenor by collecting real time data of inventory, logistics and customer buying trends among other things. The collected data helps in formulating better distribution strategies and brings cost synergies in the system.
