In this digital age, retailers' digital strategy and business strategy are becoming one as consumers increasingly expect a more customized shopping experience - one that provides value and convenience. Their expectations are higher than ever before, with more choices in products and more ways in which to interact with retailers. This is a huge challenge in an industry already dealing with complex operations and intense competition.

Analytics have enabled online retailers to provide shoppers with customized offers based on their likes, dislikes, and past purchase and browsing histories. Today, a new paradigm is coming into play: thehyper-relevantshopping experience. Hyper-relevance brings insight to bear in the context of each individual shopping journey, in store and out. It enables consumers to receive what they want, when and how they want it. Hyper-relevance helps convert shoppers to buyers, similar to online retail. This change is possible because the Internet of Everything (IoE) allows us to make the right connections needed to gather data and perform analytics on the data to create customized experiences for shoppers.

A recent Cisco Retail study found IoE-enabled solutions offer retailers an opportunity to provide their customers withhyper-relevantexperiences that blend the best of online shopping with the advantages of the in-store experience. When consumers visit a website, they leave a data trail behind. This data, combined with customers' purchase and social data, allows an online retailer to provide customized product recommendations or discounts. For brick-and-mortar retailers, this same level of customization has been tough to provide in-store. IoE changes this by creating new ways to connect with customers by "sensing" the behavior that leads to their buying patterns.

Cisco's Connected Analytics for Retail (CAR) solution brings innovative IoE analytics capabilities to life.

Our deep heritage in wireless infrastructure and video technologies, coupled with our ability to bring together data from mobility/location, video and sensor data sources, enables us to connect structured, unstructured, and real time data. Our analytics solution turns all this data into relevant insight to specifically help retailers improve their store operations and enhance their shopper's in-store shopping experience.

Analytics on in-store shopper behavior helps retailers know more about their shoppers' in-store journey. This allows them to provide a better, more personalized in-store experience, much like an online shopping experience. By giving customers what they want- value and convenience- retailers can gain a competitive advantage by differentiating their brand.

CAR is useful across different roles within retail. Buyers, merchandisers, marketers, and store management can all benefit from store analytics. For example, CAR's Wi-Fi/location and video analytics capabilities deliver detailed, real-time customer traffic patterns, dwell times, and path analysis. This can be used by store managers to improve staff allocation in departments and speed up checkout lines. Marketers can use analytics to improve product placement, create more relevant displays, and analyze customer basket contents to understand purchase patterns.

So why Cisco for retail analytics? Cisco provides an analytics solution that addresses multiple channels of retail analytics including: real-time customer context,social media, mobile, store analytics, and transactions. In contrast, other existing retail analytics providers focus on one, maybe two specific channels of retail analytics. Moreover, CAR leverages Cisco edge routers and compute infrastructure deployed within the stores. This means CAR is a scalable analytics solution for small as well as large environments. With CAR, our retail customers gain insight across different customer touchpoints to differentiate their brand in this new age of IoE.

For more information, visit www.cisco.com/go/ca-retail or email [email protected]

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