Telia and tech company Cleveron will test a robotic self-service Telia kiosk for customers in rural communities. The initiative aims to expand Telia’s presence in smaller towns by bringing the business closer to the customers.
Telia in Estonia has looked into new and sustainable ways to ensure the availability of its services for the small town population – towns where Telia does not have any traditional outlets for customers to replace their devices or receive ordered goods.
Together with Cleveron, which produces robotics-based parcel terminals, Telia has co-created a “self-service screen and parcel robot integration” which will be set up and tested in the town of Rapla in Estonia.
The solution is built on Cleveron’s innovative automated pick-up lockers. When the customer enters the kiosk, they can interact with Telia’s service center via a touch screen, buy and pay via the payment terminal integrated with the screen, get popular items from a pre-filled parcel robot or pick up ordered goods the next day.
Initiative to expand presence in non-urban areas
Katre Liiberg, Head of Sales and Customer Service at Telia in Estonia, says the company has explored new ways to re-establish its presence in a sustainable way in smaller towns across Estonia for a long time.
“Regional representation is important both for us as a company and for the community, but the traditional solutions for providing services locally are not viable from a business perspective. We are always looking for ways to contribute to regional development and this is our way of solving structural problems in an innovative and sustainable way. This solution would help us bring our services and support even closer to our customers, and also increase digital inclusion. In the future, we are planning to automate it even further so that Telia’s services will be available 24/7,” says Liiberg.
“Parcel robot is an automated solution for delivering all kinds of items, and they can easily be pre-filled. We created a self-service screen as an additional feature which helps to expand the possibilities – the screen and robot combo can be a service station or a complete store, almost like a high-tech vending machine,” says Arti Kütt, Project Manager at Cleveron.
