The retail ‘icon’ store called 'Discovery' was designed by Geyer and  is on the corner of Swanston and Bourke streets in central Melbourne – an upmarket shopping precinct.

The ‘curated’ product range includes drones, Crumple bags, tablets, PCs, tech fashion accessories, security cameras, home controllers, and eventually health related monitors.

Telstra stores have been, at best, a little staid and clinical, but this store portends the future of Telstra stores – hip with an in-store barister.

It has tap and take, high-resolution, ‘touch tables’ where customers can see all the information about a device. Telstra plans to roll this out to all its company owned stores.

Telstra expects the new store to pull in as many as 5000 customers a day in the lead-up to Christmas, double its normal store traffic in the old-style shop.

Telstra Country Wide, Andrew Coull said aspects of the flagship store would eventually be rolled out across the Telstra network.

"We need to innovate and be ahead of customer demand to ensure we're providing the best possible service for our customers. The challenge is connecting with customers in what was an increasingly digital business - competition was not limited to high-profile players such as Apple,” he said.

"In all honesty, I think if you look at the breadth of what we are going to be doing in this space, it's a very wide-angled lens in terms of competition. We are really trying to set a new standard for how we serve customers, how we connect them and how we educate them," he said.

"We really want to make this store feel really local - so it is part of the community," he said.

Telstra provided the following information:

PEOPLE

• It employs a team of 75 tech experts who have completed extensive training on customer needs and behaviors, and creating personalised experiences.
• The team has a high level of gender and ethnic diversity. The team is able to serve customers in Mandarin, Cantonese, French, Spanish, Malay, Hokkien, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Napali, Newari and Vietnamese, which are among the most popular languages spoken in the Melbourne CBD.
• The team will also curate the Top 10 tech space within the store, providing their personal reviews, tips and recommendations on tech products and services for customers.

FEATURES & TECHNOLOGY

• More than 1,500 devices are live in the store, showcasing the range of products and services available from Telstra.
• It has 36 HD screens around the store offering customers information on products and services.
• Heat mapping cameras (which monitor the flow of customers in store) and a traffic counter at the entry of the store assist with managing service and fine tuning the layout of the store.
• The WISE Foundation charity pop-up café is expected to make more than 80 free coffees each day.
• “+61” is the accessories shop within a shop’ and will include everything from connected hand-bags that charge devices to GoPro cameras and drones.
• Tap and Take capabilities have been expanded into more areas of the Melbourne store, providing customers with the ability to tap and take information on more product categories.
• Improved wireless technology in the store enables the store team to reduce transaction and wait times for customers.

Earlier this year, the Sydney Discovery store won the International Design Award from the Internal Retail Design Institute (New York) and the Service Design Award from the Sydney Design Awards.