Retail Industry, the NOW opportunity for our Partners!

Every quarter I conduct a partner facing enablement webinar for our partners entitled Industry Digital Transformation for Retail and each time I am struck with the opportunity we have right NOW in retail! Just recently completed another one of these sessions so I thought I would share a few of the key messages that we delivered recently and also some interesting feedback from the audience.

We all know that retail as an industry is going through massive digital transformation, that’s been well documented! Let’s dig into that digital transformation in retail a bit deeper so that all of our partners reading this can understand this dynamic more as they start to align to the sales plays we have established in retail as well as creating new solutions and services based off of those plays. We will break it into four parts:

Customer Experience: Yes, we all want our Starbucks coffee faster, or our groceries picked up quicker or scan and go options, but the reality is people really want a Omni-Channel and personalized experience and our end customers are in the middle of figuring out what that means to them.
More productive associates: The largest opportunity of them all, the opportunity to digitize the workforce, provide tools for effective communication, customer service and personalized information is a huge opportunity that all of us should be thinking about.
Optimizing Operations: We’ve all heard the phrase work smarter not harder, this applies here! From quicker roll out of offers, to new experiences in stores, to better application and transaction experiences we all have work to do to help our customers realize this fully.
Protection: Both physical locations as well as data privacy both present serious risk for our end customers. Our partners have a huge opportunity to leverage their expertise, in many cases, and provide turnkey offerings that leverage the Cisco portfolio.

So what is Cisco doing to tackle these opportunities, you ask? Well, we have taken the approach of taking our architectures aligning them to 3 key Sales Plays: Store Fabric, Store Mobility and Secure Store under the Digital Store concept and aligning the use cases, the ecosystem partners and creating the tools needed for our partners to communicate and sell accordingly!

Here are a few of those resources:

Cisco Retail case studies and use cases: http://www.cisco.com/go/retail

Industries Partner Guide: http://cs.co/customerin

Embrace the partner ecosystem that Cisco has created in Retail, with tools such as the Ecosystem Partner locater http://cs.co/epl

Take advantage of our Industry Ecosystem Education series for Retail: http://cisco.cvent.com/events/cisco-industry-transformation-ecosystem-education-webinar-series-retail-q3-q4-2018/event-summary-c7317b2efc5d41239191675c90a2245c.aspx

So in conclusion, take advantage of this digital transformation in retail. Let us partner with you to capture a 500 Billion dollar retail market together!