For retailers that consider the telephone to be an important tool in serving their customers, Retail Connect allows you transform the way your store or branch uses the telephone everyday to bring significantly more value to your business.  Retail Connect will help you to give priority treatment to your most important customers, ensuring that you get the sale and that they come back for more next time.  It will allow your sales associates to more efficiently handle incoming calls by streamlining interaction with your point-of-sale and/or CRM solutions to automatically lookup customer information and pre-populate forms.  It will give your managers an at-a-glance dashboard to see whether staff are busy answering calls or whether they are missing potential sales opportunities.  Your revenue will increase, your costs will decrease, and your customer service will skyrocket…

Designed For Retail Store Locations
Retail Connect is designed for enterprises with large numbers of retail outlets or branch offices to help provide managers and store personnel with the information they need about their phone system to run their operations more effectively.  Combined with Cisco’s Unified Communications platform, it provides a robust, feature-rich solution that transforms your phone system from merely a few telephones to an complete communications solution that is intelligently integrated into your business process.  Retail Connect can be deployed in distributed or centralized models, but provides localized functionality to the individual stores.  And system management can be performed either locally or remotely, as desired.

Makes Sales Associates More Productive
Every minute a sales associate spends finding and transferring a call to someone else who knows the account or specific product line better is a minute they are not’t spending helping other customers and taking sales orders. And given that some customers generate more store sales than others, over the long term you are not just losing today’s sale from that big customer who could not wait on hold.

With Retail Connect, incoming calls from designated priority customers will receive distinctive ring tones and flashing lights, as well as specific customer information on the Cisco IP Phone handset displays, to ensure that the customer gets priority treatment the second the call is answered.  The phones are additionally linked to individual POS terminals in the store allowing sales personnel to instantly link incoming caller information to the information on their screens to quickly process orders or address customer services matters.

Additionally, the Retail Connect management dashboard shows real-time performance data about the phone system, showing active calls and missed calls with priority color coding, and produces historical call reports, including successful calls, missed calls, wait time, etc. With Retail Connect providing unprecedented access to this information at a local store or branch office level, managers can better understand customer behavior and calling patterns to ensure high performance from their staff and to make adjustments accordingly.

Keeping It Simple
Retail Connect is tightly integrated with Cisco’s Unified Communications product line.   The hardware for individual stores can be as simple and cost-effective as a lone Cisco Integrated Services Router (2800/3800 series) or UC500 running Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager Express and some Cisco IP Phones.  This offering includes a fully functional IP PBX with optional T1/EI trunk interfaces and integrated unified messaging and automated attendant capability, as well as routing, switching, and security features.

Key Benefits:

• Increase sales
• Improve customer service
• Ensure customer loyalty
• Better understand customer behavior
• Differentiate from competition
• Enhance operational efficiency

Product Features:

• Distinctive ring and flashing buttons based on customer priority
• Phone display of customer data, such as name, company, priority level, phone number, etc.
• Management dashboard shows active calls and missed calls in real-time, with priority color coding
• Management dashboard produces historical call reports, including successful calls, missed calls, wait time, etc.
• Specialized call treatment by priority level, automated announcements, and music on hold
• IBM validated: Ready for IBM Retail Integration Framework

Hardware Components:

• Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Call Manager) or Communications Manager Express on ISR routers/UC500
• Retail Connect Application Server. This can be a separate server or Cisco's Application Extension Platform (AXP) combining the ISR router and the application server in a single box
• Cisco Unified IP Phones

Software Components:

The following Voice and Application Servers are supported:	The following Voice XML Browsers are supported:
JBoss    Apache Tomcat WebSphere Application Server 6.1	Cisco IOS Voice XML Browser 12.4(3) +
The following Database servers are supported:	The following Operating Systems are supported
PostgreSQL IBM DB2 9	Server: Linux Red Hat Enterprise 3 Update 5 Windows Server 2003 Solaris 5.8 Desktop Client: Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003
The following Web browsers for administration are supported:	The following PBX’s are supported
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5,  6.0, 7.0 Mozilla Firefox 2+	Cisco Unified Communications Manager 5 + Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express

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Question: Retail Connect seems like it does many of the things that contact center applications do. Is it as complex and as difficult to operate as a contact center solution?

Answer: No, Retail Connect's overriding design guideline is small size and simplicity. It is designed to be installed in a large number of branches/stores, and operated by in-store/branch personnel.

Question: Can Retail Connect be managed by a centralized IT or telecom group?

Answer: Yes, Retail Connects flexible architecture allows either local or remote management of the system within the branch/store.

Question: Given Retail Connect does many things that contact center software does, is it expensive?

Answer: No, Retail Connect is priced to be attractive for companies that wish to deploy it in as few as a dozen stores/branches, or as many as thousands of stores/branches.