NRF 2024: What we learned over coffee at the year’s biggest retail event

You can always count on the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) Big Show to pull the industry headfirst into the new year, uniting thousands of exhibitors in celebrating the “people, policies, and ideas that help retail succeed.”

This year’s event occurred at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City­—and Cisco was honored to attend.

It’s no secret that many retailers face challenges retaining staff, optimizing resources, and delivering frictionless customer experiences. But mastering the art of conversational commerce can really help minimize these pain points, as we demonstrated at this year’s event—while serving up a lot of coffees! (But more on that later.)

In this blog, we will unpack the three themes that we felt came through loud and clear at this year’s event—and how to respond to drive retail success in 2024.

Theme #1: A lesson in conversational commerce

The majority of customers today want personalized, context-aware conversations that connect seamlessly across the customer journey.

Just ask the 75% of consumers who say they prefer to engage with brands using instant messaging. They’re tired of dialing helplines and signing up to web portals, and if they have to download a proprietary app, it needs to justify its place on their device. So, what does conversational retail look like?

At NRF 2024, we answered that question with Café Cisco, our very own pop-up coffee bar delivered through conversational mobile ordering.

To begin an order, attendees scanned a QR code at the bar to receive a drinks menu through either Apple Messages for Business or Google Business Messages. They could then pick their drink from a pre-populated list and confirm their order using whatever words they pleased in response to our friendly barista chatbot (who also happens to be trained in Natural Language Processing (NLP).

It looked a little something like this:

Many attendees were surprised by the experience and the absence of a dedicated retail app to fulfill the orders. But meeting your customers where they are on their favorite digital channels is a huge opportunity to:

• Orchestrate connected customer conversations that never lose context

• Nurture brand loyalty through convenient two-way service interactions

• Field routine queries and accelerate order fulfillment and resolution

And this is just one of countless possibilities. The nature of your retail services and the channels your customers use will influence how you automate and orchestrate the retail journey. This leads us to our next theme.

Theme #2: Automation is driving retail transformation

Automation was a big focus at this year’s NRF as a topic of interest and a way to share information with event attendees through automated kiosks. It indicates a wider trend as retailers turn to AI to automate routine processes and interactions.

Socioeconomic disruption and “the great attrition” have put many retailers in a difficult position, exemplified by spiraling operating costs, unengaged workforces, and rising customer expectations. That’s where automated chatbots can help to streamline and enhance the employee and customer experience. For example, you can:

• Automate internal comms to let employees access information, manage shifts, report sickness, and even submit holidays on their favorite digital channels

• Automate routine customer interactions and offer on-demand self-service options in-channel to reduce staffing costs and free resources for value-adding tasks

• Use QR codes and other contextual triggers to drive shoppers to messaging channels in-store and online, where they can checkout, arrange delivery, and more

Automated chatbots also help retailers meet rising demand for flexible checkout and delivery options such as click and collect. For example, customers can order an item online and state their fulfilment preferences to the retailer’s chatbot in-channel.

That conversation can be resumed at any time, on any channel, giving customers easy access to your brand services without repeating themselves each time they make contact. Should they need to speak to a human agent, chatbots can recognize when its limits are met and hand the conversation over seamlessly.

You can also use this rolling conversation to share personalized recommendations and offers, inform customers of store hours and stock availability, update their wish lists, and more.

Theme #3: Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) delivers omnichannel excellence

To deliver conversational commerce at scale, you need a purpose-built platform to automate end-to-end customer journeys across multiple channels.

These platforms are called CPaaS, and they’re transforming how global retailers engage with their customers (and employees, too). Instead of sending an ad-hoc SMS text or email, retailers can use CPaaS to integrate the latest digital channels with a wide range of third-party systems, offering a one-stop shop for timely, personalized interactions.

CPaaS integrations democratize access to data, enabling everyone to build meaningful experiences. In practice, this means users can access the data to trigger contextual interactions such as abandoned cart reminders or employee payroll updates. Plus, any data created by these interactions is fed back into your systems in real-time to inform later stages of the customer or employee journey.

The best CPaaS providers also include visual journey builders, which let non-technical users create end-to-end experiences. In fact, that’s exactly how we orchestrated the Café Cisco customer journey.

With 95% of global businesses expected to use CPaaS by 2025, it’s understandable that so many of the people we spoke to at NRF showed interest in centralizing retail communications. But choosing the right CPaaS provider is so important to getting conversational commerce right.

Get to know Webex Connect

Webex Connect is an enterprise-grade CPaaS that makes orchestrating and automating digital interactions easy. It’s flexible and collaborative—enabling business teams and developers to work together and build dynamic experiences that fully exploit your business systems and customer data.

Non-technical users can create engaging journeys in minutes using our low-code visual builder. Amending the flow is easy too, with the power to change a customer’s time zone or preferred channel with a simple drag and drop. And with support for many of the latest digital channels, you can meet your customers and employees where they are—when and where it matters most.

Learn more about Webex Connect and how it works alongside the Webex App and Webex Contact Center to enhance retail operations. You can also see how we delivered the Café Cisco experience at NRF 2024.