Cisco created a smart store with the full power of the Cisco portfolio to empower data-driven decision making, with improved customer experience and operational efficiency — plus increased revenue. See how.
In an era where e-commerce dominates retail, running a successful brick-and-mortar store is getting harder and harder. Online stores have volumes of data about customer behavior and demographics, while physical locations have traditionally operated with limited visibility into what actually happens on the store floor.
With this in mind, we found ourselves asking – what if physical stores could harness the same level of analytics that power the success of e-commerce? This became a core objective of the Cisco Store.
To do that, we adapted our technology stack to combine smart building technology, observability, assurance, and collaboration solutions to enable data-driven decision-making abilities that we were lacking in our physical stores. The results exceeded our expectations – with a 40% year-over-year revenue increase, enhanced customer experiences, and improved operational efficiencies.
The Cisco Store: A retail showcase of innovation and technology
The Cisco Store is the merchandiser for Cisco branded apparel and accessories with both online and physical stores. Our physical stores are comprised of 2 permanent locations, and ongoing pop-up traveling stores often seen at Cisco Live and other industry events around the world.
We saw an opportunity to reimagine our physical stores with the collective power of Cisco’s portfolio. This led to the creation of the Cisco Store Tech Lab: our store’s technical showcase environment powered by our Cisco and partner technology. Hosted alongside the Cisco store physical locations, customers and visitors can experience the Cisco Store Tech Lab firsthand through interactive demonstrations and walkthroughs at our travel stores during events, as well as at our permanent storefronts.
Now, the Cisco Store Tech Lab is a common go-to testing environment and customer zero for Cisco product teams’ latest and greatest innovations. As customer zero, we deploy new solutions and products before they reach our customers. This allows us to gather and share learnings with the product teams to advance their solutions and improve them for our customers. We’re also constantly looking at how to create more connections and integration points across our technology.
Hurdles to innovation: The complexities of modern retail
One key challenge we wanted to address was the limited data available in our physical stores. This one limitation led to multiple, interconnected challenges:
- Customer analytics and visibility: We struggled to understand the demographics of our store visitors to ensure we had the right inventory in stock and the best floor plan per event based on location.
- Inventory management: We lacked sufficient visibility into inventory stock levels and needed a more dynamic approach to ensure optimal product availability and minimize sales loss.
- Energy consumption: We were facing high energy costs associated with keeping systems and devices running continuously. We needed a better way to track, monitor, and adjust energy usage.
- Security: Like any retailer, preventing in-store theft was a top concern. We needed a better way to monitor and detect theft, particularly at our pop-up traveling stores.
- Lack of monitoring for technology solutions: The growth of our tech stack brought an influx of diverse data sources, but we lacked the tools to monitor and manage them effectively. This made it difficult to quickly identify and resolve issues, manage system performance, and extract insights needed for strategic decision-making.
From insights to action: The solutions that redefined our success
We needed to reimagine our technology infrastructure to find ways to capture customer insights in our physical stores, improve how we communicate with our customers, ensure seamless connectivity, and unify visibility and analytics across our entire environment. To do this, we implemented:
- Smart building technology: With the use of Meraki Smart Cameras, Meraki Sensors, Meraki Access Points, and Cisco Spaces we generated real-time insights into customer demographics and behavior and each individual store to enable tailored marketing and inventory strategies, improve energy management, and enhance operational efficiency through automated systems and precise location-based analytics.
- Collaboration software: Webex Connect provides seamless communication and prompt responses to customer inquiries and those needing support through automated agent interactions.
- Assurance: ThousandEyes provides end-to-end visibility across complex environments of owned and unowned networks for enhanced detection, analysis, and response to service impacting issues.
- Observability: Splunk Enterprise, Splunk IT Service Intelligence, Splunk Edge Hub, and Splunk Real User Monitoring work collectively to deliver comprehensive and real-time analytics, monitoring, and insights into diverse data sources, IT service health, and user interactions while efficiently managing data processing loads.
Outcome-driven innovation: Achieving efficiency, resilience, and growth
Through the collective power of our deployed solutions, we delivered a range of critical outcomes that improved efficiency, resilience, and customer experiences. Here’s a closer look at impactful results we’ve achieved:
- Improved operational efficiency and revenue growth
We increased our revenue 40% YoY with enhanced inventory management strategies and improved customer insights and engagement. - Strengthened digital resilience
We achieved zero unplanned downtime with full visibility to detect and resolve issues faster, reduce alert noise, and align IT performance with business priorities. - Reduced energy usage
With energy management through automated scheduling, we reduced energy consumption by 66%. - Enhanced security
We strengthened our in-store security with Meraki Smart Cameras. Using its Smart Search function, we can now pinpoint exactly when inventory goes missing and identify responsible parties in real-time. - Improved network reliability and assurance
Now if an issue arises with our POS system or network, we can quickly resolve it to minimize disruption thanks to critical insights into network health. - Bridged the gap of online-level analytics in our physical stores
We can now analyze in-store customer demographics, behavior patterns, and purchase conversion rates to drive strategic adjustments to merchandising and product assortments.
I am so proud of the work that our Cisco Store and product teams have achieved, but our journey doesn’t end here. We will continue to add in new innovations to benefit both our store operations and customer experience. Some exciting additions to come in the near future:
- More personalized offers for in-store visitors with Cisco Spaces
- More granular data collection with WiFi 7
- Predictive analytics capabilities with Splunk
- More efficiently address fraud and cybersecurity concerns with Splunk Enterprise Security
- Further enhance customer service by incorporating Webex AI Agent into Webex Connect for a more conversational and informative experience
- Aggregate online and in store data using Splunk to get full observability of our operations, enable visibility of customer behavioral data across channels, and maintain the health of our operations
- Integration of ThousandEyes with Splunk IT Service Intelligence to strengthen observability of our network health, including external systems and infrastructure
See the latest and greatest first-hand
The Cisco Store team is gearing up for Cisco Live in San Diego this June and ready to welcome thousands of attendees! We’ll be hosting Tech Lab tours and lightning talks to showcase our latest tech, including Meraki Smart Cameras, ThousandEyes, Splunk and the Webex AI Agent. If you’ll be at Cisco Live this June, come visit us and see first–hand how we are continuing to enhance our customer experience, security, and operational efficiency.
Additional Resources:
- To hear more about how the Cisco Store deployed and is using Splunk, check out this blog post
- To get more information about how the Cisco Store is using smart building technology, read this blog post
- Access more Cisco on Cisco success stories
- For tours and more information about the Cisco Store Tech Lab, explore our videos
- Browse the Cisco Store
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