Phillip Morris International

DTE was created to shift retailers from in-person buying and hand-held account support into a modern digital environment where they could manage tasks, promotions, incentives, and orders independently. But as adoption scaled, a new challenge surfaced: the hidden “drag” placed on account teams who spent countless hours answering basic how-to questions. For many retailers, DTE felt complex and uncertain. With different market setups, journeys, and configurations, even simple actions became stressful during peak store hours. Each hesitation, misclick, or unclear step slowed their business and increased dependency on human support.

As PMI accelerated digital transformation, it became clear that retailers didn’t just need a system – they needed confidence. Markets needed onboarding that didn’t require in-person training, journeys that didn’t demand learning new interfaces, and support that didn’t rely on calling an account manager. Retailers needed a DTE that guided them intuitively, anticipated where they might struggle, and made daily work feel simpler, faster, and more empowering. So, we reimagined DTE experience from the ground up: not as a tool to be mastered, but as an experienced companion that guides retailers effortlessly through their daily work and scales flawlessly across 13+ countries in 10 languages across mobile and desktop experiences.

We transformed DTE into a customer experience engine in 13+ countries with 390,00 unique external partners across 10 languages. Instead of redesigning every local DTE variant, we redesigned how retailers feel when using the platform. The solution introduces:

• Contextual Smart Tips that anticipate confusion before it happens, reducing cognitive load at the moment of need.
• Smart Walk Thrus that guides retailers through new or complex tasks step by step, replacing hours of training with seconds of clarity.
• Localizable yet consistent UX patterns, ensuring every market feels familiar without sacrificing the nuances of local processes.
• Dynamic nudges and micro interactions that restore confidence by making DTE feel supportive rather than demanding.
• Enhanced accessibility through local-language audio guidance for retailers with limited literacy, giving every user the ability to navigate DTE with confidence. For the first time, retailers who rely on sound rather than text can complete tasks independently, understand offers instantly, and fully participate in PMI’s digital ecosystem.
• Unified guidance architecture that scales across 13+ countries, allowing markets to deploy quickly while delivering a consistent global experience.

This approach transforms DTE from a system that needs explanation into one that explains itself – empowering retailers with intuitive, error-free journeys.

The DTE transformation delivered measurable global impact, saving over 165,000 hours for retailers and PMI teams. The customer experience transformation delivered measurable, global-scale impact:

• In 2025 7,872 desktop users engaged with DTE guidance, generating 403,874 desktop interactions, and 973,624 mobile users totaled 13,251,000 mobile interactions.
• Serbia: Reduced support tickets by 40%, and time on education calls by 46%.
• Greece: Achieved a 23.4% increase in task success rates, a 20% reduction in support calls, and saved 244 training hours.

Beyond that volume, the quality of the experience improved dramatically: Retailers’ complete tasks faster, with fewer errors and less frustration. Markets report reduced dependency on account managers for basic navigation support. Guided tasks and Smart Tips enhance journey completion rates while lowering operational friction. Most importantly, the emotional impact is clear: retailers feel more confident, more autonomous, and more supported.

The innovation lies in designing DTE around human behavior, not system structure. Rather than adding more instructions or static documentation, we created a digital companion that adapts to the retailer’s pace, need, and context in their flow of work. The solution blends behavioral design, microcopy, contextual triggers, and a global experience library into a single, seamless layer. Creative elements include:

• Human-centered micro journeys that remove uncertainty at the exact moment it appears.
• A cross-system language consistent across DTE variants and markets.
• Invisible UX support: guidance appears only when helpful, never interrupting or overwhelming.
• Local language audio content for literacy challenged retailers in markets where traditional promotion methods are limited by government mandate.
• A design philosophy inspired by consumer apps: simple, friendly, and intuitive.

This shifts DTE from a procedural tool to a confidence-building experience.

What makes us most proud is how quickly DTE evolved into a global customer-experience standard. Markets that once waited months for improvements can now deploy enhancements in days, because every SmartTip, walkthrough, and rule lives inside a living, reusable library that blends global consistency with thoughtful local nuance. The same architecture now supports retailers from the Philippines to Lithuania and Australia, proving its resilience across the most diverse and demanding market realities.

But our proudest moment came when we pushed accessibility further than ever before. In Pakistan, we introduced local-language audio guidance for retailers with limited literacy—an innovation that allowed users who rely on sound rather than text to navigate DTE confidently, complete tasks independently, and fully participate in PMI’s digital ecosystem. Seeing retailers who had previously struggled with digital tools suddenly complete journeys on their own is the kind of transformation that goes far beyond efficiency; it restores dignity, autonomy, and trust. What began as an enablement toolkit has become PMI’s global benchmark for effortless, inclusive, low-friction retail journeys.

Delivered by the PMI DAP Team and our expanded CoE, our solutions began as a centralized delivery model that now evolved to a Hybrid model to empower newly formed Satellite Teams to build independently, with shared standards. Together, we blend UX, behavioral insight, deep system expertise and local knowledge to deliver guidance that elevates every journey into an effortless user experience. Our shared mission: create digital experiences that empower our customers to succeed effortlessly.