If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about what the Cisco Store Tech Lab looks like on the road, here’s your chance! The Cisco Store team opened a travel store at Cisco Live EMEA, held in Amsterdam from February 5-9, 2024.
First, some numbers
Around 7,100 visitors came through the Cisco Store, and 396 attendees participated in 23 tours. Tour attendees (including senior network engineers, technical solutions architects, and heads of IT) represented a wide range of industries and companies, including Adidas, Airbus Defence and Space, Amazon, Apple, BMW Group, Fujifilm, H&M, Hugo Boss, and Sephora.
Tour stops
We walked attendees through key highlights of our Tech Lab, demonstrating how multiple products can work together. We started at our grid wall (dubbed the Triforce of Wisdom), displaying Meraki cameras and sensors, RFID tags, and more, including Meraki’s latest launch, the MV13 and MV33 smart cameras.
The Triforce of Wisdom also included the Meraki MT40 smart power controller: twelve of these controllers were wired throughout the store to allow us to baseline our power consumption at the show, in partnership with CAE Labs’ WiserWatts platform. We have similarly baselined our power consumption at our San Jose store, allowing us to schedule our power and thus reducing our energy consumption by 66%! Next year, we plan to schedule our power at this show to compare energy and cost savings. WiserWatts also allows us to easily see which of our products are at end-of-life and makes suggestions on how to operate more sustainably.
Our Tech Lab expert Brian Domine then showed attendees how they can use our Cisco Store Xplorer app on their smartphones to interact with augmented reality hotspots around the store to learn more about various tech products.
Visitors had the opportunity to scan a QR code to interact with a chatbot powered by Webex Connect, allowing them to ask questions about the Cisco Store and the Tech Lab and escalate their questions to a live agent if necessary.
Visitors were then brought through our ship-to-home kiosk, featuring four iPads remotely managed on Meraki MDM. This allowed us to have full control over the tablets regardless of their location. A perimeter was also set up around the kiosk to alert us immediately if any of the iPads were removed from their docks, thus ensuring full security of our store without requiring human security guards.
The next stop was our partner VusionGroup’s electronic shelf labels, placed throughout the store. Because our travel stores employ temporary staff, they had to be able to easily find and restock merchandise. By inputting an item’s product ID, the corresponding shelf label would flash to allow for easy identification at the back-of-house, thus streamlining store operations. These labels require no additional infrastructure: they connect automatically to Meraki access points.
Moving further on into the store, visitors got a glimpse of how all the digital signage was managed by Wipro VisionEDGE. By simply clicking an MT30 smart button, our store staff would be able to change our screens to a store open / store closed state. We also demonstrated how Meraki Display, an Apple TV app, livestreamed the store’s camera feeds onto one display without requiring additional backend access, allowing our staff to easily monitor live feeds without having to log into a dashboard.
See some merchandise you like? Visitors could take advantage of our smart fitting rooms. Every item in the store was RFID-tagged, so a customer simply had to bring the item into the smart fitting room to see the product appear on the screen and request different sizes.
We then demonstrated one of our newest solutions, powered by our partner Cogniac. When a customer picked up a Sustainability Campaign or DevNet T-shirt, we trained Cogniac on the Meraki MV63 camera facing the shirts to trigger Wipro VisionEDGE to change the adjacent screen. Customers could then immediately see information about the item they had just picked up on the screen (for instance, the Sustainability Campaign video).
Almost done! Next, visitors saw how we use EVERYANGLE in conjunction with Meraki cameras to analyze customer data in the store, including demographic breakdown, customer sentiment, dwell time in specific areas, and queue counting to ensure checkout lines do not grow too long. This information gives us valuable insight into who exactly is coming through our store and how we can best cater to them. We also showed visitors VusionGroup’s Captana dashboard, which maps our products on the shelves and notifies us if anything is out of stock, as well as monitors our store’s planogram compliance, thus optimizing our store staff and merchandisers’ time.
Wrapping up
At the end of the tour, visitors could scan a QR code to participate in a Slido poll asking them about the most interesting technology they saw that day. Participants’ answers were added to a word cloud, giving us a better idea into what caught their attention! Results from the poll indicated that the Meraki sensors and smart cameras detecting proximity seemed especially interesting to our attendees.
The Cisco Store is committed to powering an inclusive future for all. We set up a donation tower at the entrance of the store, allowing passersby to drop in tokens: every token represented a €1 donation to the organization of their choice.
Our next travel store will be at Cisco Live Global in Las Vegas from June 2-6, 2024. We will be setting up an 8,000 square foot store with 24 Tech Lab tours, estimating 500+ participants from 275+ companies.
Interested in demonstrating your technology? There is still time to set up an activation with us! Please reach out — we’d love to hear your ideas.
In the meantime, check out our full tour walkthrough on our Cisco Store Tech Lab YouTube channel, and we hope to see you in-person soon!
