Meditel redirects its business to the virtual channel to overcome isolation

Meditel is one of the main operators of companies such as Telecom, Naranja and the Homedics brand. The quarantine endangered its sales network throughout the country and a call center in the center of Córdoba; the alternative found with the sale on line opened an opportunity to grow through this channel.

“Meditel has been reinventing itself for 25 years. It started with telecentres, semi-public telephones, the sale of cell phones; But this has been the most amazing change because of the speed with which our people acted and because it opened a new opportunity, ”says Pablo Parga, president of the company.

This group with a thousand employees has 80 stores in a shopping center across the country, which had to close when isolation was imposed to stop the advance of Covid-19. Given this, he renegotiated deadlines with his suppliers and focused his sellers on social networks.

These include Meditel locations to market Telecom Argentina solutions; Syna stores for mobile technology products and cell phone accessories; the islands where they sell Homedics personal wellness items (massagers and other personal care products); and also the Naranja service posts in Córdoba, Tucumán, Salta and Jujuy.

“Each manager guided his teams and the best seller of a product trained the rest of the sales force. The activity fell a little, but still a good level of movement was maintained, to such an extent that it was not necessary to take credit to pay salaries, “explained the manager.

The same measure was taken with the call center of 600 people that it has in five floors on Ituzaingó street, which works for the attention of Personnel.

“Employees took their computers and started working from home on the same platform, thanks to the support of Telecom to solve problems in places where our employees did not have internet. Today the call center works at more than 90 percent of its capacity ”, Parga highlights.

A new sales channel

Under this scheme organized by the CEO of the company, Ignacio Aird, it has already launched its commercial channel, even though 80 percent of its sales are still mobile technology products.

To do this, he capitalized on the work he had been doing with the application of artificial intelligence technologies (data processing) to identify purchasing trends of his clients and direct commercial actions.

According to Parga, the channel on line It has all the potential to continue growing and to represent, when consolidated, around 30 percent of total sales.

“It will grow very fast. The coronavirus generated new skills such as remote work, solidarity, empathy and, above all, teamwork; It was the missing push to put the ship on that course. For this reason, we now have several projects with that objective, especially in terms of direct sales. ”

In any case, not everything is positive for the Cordovan group, which had firm plans to arrive in Brazil this year and which had to be suspended.

“We had the merchandise at Customs and the stands already made. Unfortunately, but it could not be released, ”said the businessman.