GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor of the Ex­cel­lent Group of Com­pa­nies Fran­co Siu Chong says more can be done bet­ter to fight crime.

Speak­ing at the open­ing of Dig­i­cel’s New Ex­pe­ri­ence flag­ship store at Ex­cel­lent City Cen­tre in down­town

Port-of-Spain on Thurs­day evening, Siu Chong, when asked whether he was sat­is­fied with the au­thor­i­ties ef­forts to tack­le crim­i­nal el­e­ments he said, “I must say it’s chal­leng­ing and it can be bet­ter and they can do bet­ter. It’s not an easy task to keep crime down but they have keep at it.”

How­ev­er, with Christ­mas fast ap­proach­ing Siu Chong is as­sur­ing se­cu­ri­ty will be beefed-up at to en­sure cus­tomers feel safe while do­ing their shop­ping.

And echo­ing sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments of crime be­ing a con­cern Dig­i­cel’s T&T CEO Abra­ham Smith said, “It (crime) is ab­solute­ly a con­cern. It’s a con­cern for us and for our staff. But we’ve got great com­mit­ments from Ex­cel­lent City, we’ve got great com­mit­ments from the city of Port-of-Spain and al­so our own se­cu­ri­ty which we are beef­ing-up to make sure our staff and cus­tomers feel com­fort­able.”

The store was pre­vi­ous­ly lo­cat­ed at ANSA Cen­tre Mar­aval Road, Port-of-Spain.

Asked about the rent Smith not­ed the space at Ex­cel­lence is much larg­er how­ev­er, the rent was “about the same.”

On the rea­son for the move Smith said it was to in­crease its foot traf­fic and make its of­fer­ing more eas­i­ly ac­ces­si­ble to cus­tomers.

“This was not a cost sav­ings ini­tia­tive by any means. We saw it as the per­fect op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­lo­cate to a space where it would be clos­er to our cus­tomers and al­low us to bet­ter serve their needs. This store is a lot more ac­ces­si­ble, es­pe­cial­ly to the trav­el­ling pub­lic, as it is now on nu­mer­ous taxis routes,” he ex­plained.

At ap­prox­i­mate­ly 5,000 sq ft, this is Dig­i­cel’s largest store in T&T.

With the ad­di­tion­al space, the store has added new ser­vices such as a learn­ing cen­tre, The Knowl­edge Bar, where it will be host­ing ed­u­ca­tion­al work­shops for cus­tomers to im­prove their tech-savvi­ness.

There’ al­so a Dig­i­cel+ ex­pe­ri­en­tial zone where cus­tomers can try-out and in­ter­act with home-based prod­ucts.

The store al­so fea­tures in­ter­ac­tive de­vice dis­plays of the lat­est mo­bile gad­gets and phones.

“We’ve thought about the cus­tomer, sim­pli­fied their ex­pe­ri­ence with us, and have pushed dig­i­tal a bit fur­ther with the in­clu­sion of more self-ser­vice kiosks for bill pay­ments, and self-ser­vice com­put­ers where cus­tomers can re­quest as­sis­tance, trou­bleshoot is­sues and log tick­ets on their own,” Smith added.