NANJING, China, Mar. 2019 – Whale Cloud and China Telecom are recognized as finalists for the “Outstanding Customer Centricity Award” under the TM Forum’s Excellence Award 2019. This award category recognizes companies who have made a truly outstanding contribution to improve customer centricity and their customer experience.

As an annual program in its twelfth year, the Excellence Awards highlight companies that demonstrate commitment to the evolution of the industry through digital transformation, adoption and suite of best practices and standards that TM Forum delivers through its Collaboration Community. “As ever, the quality of the competition this year was incredibly high,” said Nik Willetts, CEO, TM Forum. “With 5G fast approaching and pressure to digitally transform intensifying, it’s great to see these organizations pave the way for change and transformation.”

The recognition of Whale Cloud and China Telecom as finalists covers the joint work of the two parties to carry out China Telecom New Retail initiatives. Defined as digital transformation for telecom boutique, the project aims at providing innovative customer experience, increasing sales volume (both online and offline sales) through analytics-driven customer insights and innovative business models and customer services.

Whale Cloud leverages Alibaba’s New Retail mindset to transform CSP’s traditional Point of Sales, adopts leading technologies, e.g. intelligent service bot, cloud shelf, and AR technology, to create business-moment driven sales, and innovate new customer touchpoints, merges the online and offline service to provide seamless customer experience.

In 2018, China Telecom initiated the New Retail pilot project in one of its subsidiaries, which has started paying off handsomely with significant increase of sales volume and revenue. China Telecom will continue to transform its legacy retail stores and expand the New Retail boutiques in its nationwide subsidiaries.

The Excellence Award recipients are determined by an independent and impartial judging panel comprised of leading industry and subject matter experts. Each entry is reviewed by the panel in detail, initially identifying the finalists in each category, and then through analysis and debate, voting on the winners in each category.

TM Forum will announce the winners of the 2019 Excellence Awards at the Excellence Award Gala during Digital Transformation World on May 13, 2019 in Nice, France.