Qwest CEO’s Retail Experience Brings New Perspective to Telecom

6:30 am on January 29, 2008 | Category: Business, Internet, Telecom Services, Television

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Ed Mueller, the new CEO of Qwest Communications, is bringing a new perspective and new strategies to the #3 U.S. telephone provider, building on his experience in the retail sector.

Mueller has strong experience in the telecom industry, serving in various executive positions at Pacific Bell and SBC Communications in the late 1990s and early 2000s. After his retirement as Chief Executive of Ameritech, an SBC subsidiary, Mueller spent three years in the CEO’s chair at Williams-Sonoma, parent company of the Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma retail chains.

Today, Mueller feels that this experience has changed his perspective on the telecom industry. “In retail, it’s all about the customer,” he said in a recent interview. “You learn in a hurry. Unlike telecom, there is no recurring revenue in retail. You start every day with zero in the cash register.”

The primary challenge for big retailers, Mueller says, is to anticipate, sometimes a year ahead of time, what consumers are going to want. “There is great risk in that,” he said. “And you have to have the ability to handle failure. That calls upon a merchant’s creativity. You have to be able to say, ‘I’m not wedded to this if it’s not selling’ — even if you invested a lot in a given product.”

Now, as Qwest (and the telecom industry in general) increasingly uses the internet as a marketing and distribution channel, Mueller believes that his experience at Williams-Sonoma – a company that uses brick-and-mortar stores, catalogs, and the internet to market products – will come in handy.

“There are very few retailers that do all three, and Williams-Sonoma was the largest and the best at it,” he explained. “It’s not easy; there is a lot of non-intuitive information involved in deciding which products to sell in which venue, and which to overlap. The customers’ behavior was different in each, and the products we sold were different.”

That forward-looking approach has inspired Mueller to take a gamble on enhancing Qwest’s broadband network to better handle internet video, rather than following Verizon and AT&T into the subscription television market.

“I believe our children want to go get the customized [high-definition] content that they want, whether it’s simulcast games, which you can get off an Internet feed, or information from National Geographic for a school project on Kenyan wildlife,” Mueller said, stressing the value of “more (personalization), not less.”

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    Published by TeleClick Enterprises
    Edited by Jeremy Maddock