Ahead of NRF 2025, explore how CPaaS can help retailers build more thoughtful customer experiences.
How are you kicking off 2025? We’re heading to Retail’s Big Show from January 11-14, ready to gather alongside nearly 40,000 retail professionals in New York City to talk about the industry’s challenges and innovations. The NRF event is always the best place to put your finger on the pulse of retail and learn what’s next. We’ll be there this year to catch up with our sector colleagues, make new connections, and present our Webex customer experience (CX) solutions.
Brands need to find ways to deliver a seamless shopper journey that’s centered around more thoughtful, human communications—especially as automation and digital-first experiences offer more practical ways for brands and consumers to communicate. That means choosing the channels that put consumers in control and giving them the tools they need to engage on their terms.
The channel mix may be more complicated, but it’s so important to get right
Within our Customer Experience Portfolio, our CPaaS platform Webex Connect allows brands to automate digital interactions across multiple channels, while building meaningful touchpoints into each buyer’s experience.
Webex Connect empowers businesses to meet their customers where they are by providing access to diverse communication channels, each tailored to customer preferences and each with its own strengths.
These channels are split into three main categories: traditional, embedded, and richer digital messaging. In the traditional category, we’re talking about all the mainstays of customer comms: SMS, MMS, email voice, and so on. These are well established, well used, and will continue to provide value for customers and brands. Embedded channels, like live chat and push notifications, demand more integration but are great for maintaining engagement on your terms. Richer digital engagement channels, like WhatsApp and Apple Messages for Business, incorporate additional features to achieve more in a single message thread.
Rich messaging channels such as Rich Communication Services (RCS) – which is now available natively on Android and iOS devices – are rapidly becoming the global standard for brand communications. In addition to being able to add one-tap replies, interactive buttons, carousels, videos, and even live maps to your conversation, an organization can add their logo, brand name and description to the message, bringing added security and trust to digital messaging.
Customers shift between these channels as it suits them, often picking different combinations depending on who they’re talking to and what they’re trying to get done. To capture and keep their attention, retailers must offer the channels their customers prefer and ensure a seamless, consistent, and compelling brand experience across all of them.
Proactive communications keep customers in the know
Shoppers are now used to following their orders practically from door to door. Whether they’ve purchased groceries, clothes, or the latest smartphone model, they want to know where it is on its journey or when they can pick it up at the store.
Order, delivery and BOPIS (Buy online, pick up instore) confirmations are the core of this. But if you’re just sending simple emails or texts, you’re missing out on an opportunity to proactively engage your customers and help them take more control in their post-purchase journey.
Enabling two-way interactions—whether that’s allowing customers to respond directly to an SMS or using the interactive capabilities of RCS—means customers are free to track their order, change their delivery details, or send an inquiry to your customer service team at any time.
This self-service approach means your team spends less time handling simple requests, such as inputting a safe place for a delivery. Customers can make instant changes rather than waiting on hold, navigating an online process, or simply hoping for the best when their delivery driver arrives.
AI can help keep inquiries moving and customers happy
Returns and exchanges are important interactions for brands. An easy, pleasant experience means a customer’s much more likely to make a repeat purchase, even if it wasn’t quite right the first time. But if it’s difficult to return something or swap it, the customer may never come back.
That means you don’t want to keep customers waiting or make the returns process too complicated. An AI agent can provide support across multiple channels, from voice to live chat, to get customer inquiries moving faster and more efficiently. Instead of simply keeping customers in a holding pattern while they wait for a human agent to become available, an AI agent can triage their return or exchange request, create a label, kick off the process and reassure the customer that everything’s in hand.
Of course, sometimes customers will want to speak directly to an agent—or maybe their situation is more nuanced, and you want to make sure their request is handled with a human touch. Our solutions integrate seamlessly into your contact center operations, so you can escalate inquiries directly to human agents with full context attached, helping them provide the best possible service to your customers.
Come and see us at Retail’s Big Show
We’re just scratching the surface here—our CX portfolio offers everything you need to build an automated, connected retail experience that guides customers through their entire journey, whatever that looks like for them.
If you’re attending NRF 2025 and you’d like to explore more or ask questions, visit us at the Cisco Booth #6029 – we’d love to see you there. And if you’re elsewhere for this year’s event, you can learn more about how our CX solutions support future-focused retailers on our sector page.
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