Gaining insight about in-store retail customers
You work in operations for a nationwide retailer with hundreds of permanent physical locations, online shopping, and occasional pop-up stores. Your observability tools for online operations provide lots of information about traffic, shopper demographics, and shopper behavior. In addition, the online experience uses a single set of backend tools, making monitoring easy. However, physical stores present unique challenges:
- Lack of insight into customer demographics and behavior in your physical locations
- Difficulty monitoring the various software tools in use at the different locations
- Inventory visibility gaps in the pop-up locations
- Real-time problems at checkout
Prerequisites
Data
Software
- Splunk platform
- Splunk ITSI
- Splunk Operational Technology Intelligence (OTI) app
- Cisco Meraki MV Smart Cameras
- Cisco Meraki MT Sensors
- Cisco Meraki Platform
How to use Splunk + Cisco integrated software for this use case
Due to the variety of hardware and software solutions involved in this use case, providing an exhaustive step-by-step guide for setting up all of these tools isn’t feasible in a single article. Instead, this article offers high-level overviews and practical examples, with links to more detailed documentation and support. We recommend using Splunk and Cisco Education resources to learn more about each product listed above. For personalized assistance, consider engaging with Splunk and Cisco Professional Services.
The next two sections provide an overview of what a real Cisco customer achieved through integrating all the products listed above:
Recommended solutions
- Splunk platform: Consolidate various Cisco data sources to provide real-time monitoring and alerting, and to build persona-based dashboards.
- Splunk ITSI: Correlate IT service health with business KPIs to reduce alert noise and improve operational efficiency. For example, you can monitor a physical point of sale to learn how long a transaction takes, whether there are issues running credit cards, and, if so, how cashiers attempt to remediate problems.
- OT Intelligence (Splunk Edge Hub): Process MQTT data in unreliable internet locations, which is particularly beneficial for pop-up stores.
- Meraki MV and Meraki MT: Use these cameras and sensors to capture and analyze store traffic patterns (where customers go, what products they look at, and how long they spend in the store), demographics of customers, and environmental monitoring
- Meraki Platform: Use the Cisco Meraki Add-on to provide network telemetry to the Splunk platform across all Meraki devices.
Possible outcomes
- Revenue growth: Achieve 40 percent year-on-year revenue growth from improved inventory and customer insights.
- Better customer experience: Optimize store layouts with traffic pattern data, enable faster incident response, and reduce alert noise.
- Personalized IT: Create a single source of truth with customized dashboards and consolidated views for key personas, such as Retail Ops, IT Ops, SecOps, Store Managers, and the E‑commerce Team.
Additional resources
Now that you have an idea of how Splunk and Cisco products work together to improve your retail operations, watch the full .Conf25 Talk, Cisco + Splunk Product Integrations. In the talk, you'll see a more complete overview of Splunk and Cisco product integrations, more use cases, and an introduction to the Cisco Enterprise Networking for Splunk Platform.
In addition, you might find these Splunk resources helpful:
- Splunk Help: About the Splunk OT Intelligence App
- Cisco Documentation: Meraki MV Smart Cameras
- Cisco Documentation: Meraki MT Sensors
- Cisco Documentation: Getting Started with Meraki
- Splunkbase: List of Cisco-supported apps