How Room & Board Uses Technology to Keep Customer Experiences Personal

[00:00:03] When people talk about technology in retail, I think the conversation often focuses on e-commerce, AI or the latest customer-facing innovation. But what if the most important technology is the technology that nobody notices? Well at Cisco Live I sat down with Mark Broderick, Senior Network Engineer at Room & Board.

[00:00:28] And they are a furniture retailer built around personalised design services and long-term customer relationships. So whether customers are visiting their showroom, working with a designer remotely or planning the perfect space from the living room, technology has become a critical part in delivering that experience. So we will discuss how customer expectations have evolved, why reliable connectivity is now essential to modern retail,

[00:00:56] and how a small tech team supports dozens of locations while helping associates focus on what they do best, building meaningful relationships with their customers. And we'll also explore AI, the future of IT operations, Cisco cloud control, and why the best technology often disappears completely into the background. But enough for me, let me get him onto the podcast now.

[00:01:24] So thank you for joining me here at Cisco Live, Mark. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do? Sure. So my name is Mark Broderick. I'm a Senior Network Engineer at Room & Board. For people that don't know, Room & Board is a furniture retailer based here in the U.S. We have about 32 remote locations. Those are made up of retail locations, delivery centres and warehouses, and about 1,100 people. We're based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

[00:01:50] And we are a B Corp certified, and we're also an ESOP. Room & Board has built a reputation around personalised design services and customer relationships. But before we talk about the tech, tell listeners a little about what makes that customer experience so important to your business. Yeah, you're absolutely correct. We value the relationship that we build with our customers, right? And we want those relationships to last. So anytime we engage with both our customers and our partners, we're always looking for a partnership, right?

[00:02:18] And that means we have the good conversations. We have the difficult conversations, right? And it's always a two way street. And that's something that we really, really value. Over the last few years, we've been working on how to reach customers, how to meet them where they are. And by engaging with additional technology, we've been able to do that, right? We understand that not all of our customers are lucky enough to be located near one of our retail locations, but we still want to be able to provide an awesome design experience for them.

[00:02:45] So we've started doing virtual design appointments, which as I'm sure you can imagine from a technology perspective is difficult. It's incredibly cool though, because buying furniture is very different from buying everyday retail products and customers are making significant investments and often want guidance throughout that entire process. So how has tech changed the way your team support customers both in store and remotely? Because both are equally as important to you. Yeah, you're absolutely correct, right?

[00:03:13] Buying a piece of furniture for your space is a deeply personal decision that you're making. And it's something that you're going to, we hope you will live with for a very long time and enjoy right throughout the lifetime of that piece. So really what our job from a technology perspective is, is to not get in the way of our design associates doing the absolute best work that they do. So we want to be as invisible as possible, right? The grease in the wheels. So to that end, you know, once upon a time when we used to think about branch locations, we would think about just the branch locations, right?

[00:03:43] Well, now when we have hybrid workers and virtual design associates, now we go from something like 32 remote locations to, you know, 132 remote locations. You know, also in yesterday's land, when a user would have an issue with something like a home internet connection, you know, in general, the IT answer could be, well, come into the office and we'll figure it out later, right? That's not an acceptable answer anymore. And also the unacceptable answer is, I don't know. We have to be able to have answers.

[00:04:10] We have to have visibility and we have to have reach into those networks so that we're able to help when a user, you know, whether it be a customer or one of our design associates does have an issue. We can, if we can't fix it, we can at least answer the question of why it's happening and then arm them with the tools that they need if they need to talk to something like their own internet service provider. And one thing that stood out to me when I was researching you guys is that reliable connectivity is now essential in that design process.

[00:04:37] How has the role of the network evolved from just supporting the business to becoming an integral part of that customer experience? Yeah, I think from an IT perspective, that's something our team is always kind of valued, right? Is that we really want to be looked at as a business partner, right? We want to be brought in on those decisions. We want to have a seat at the table because we feel like we can provide a lot of value by not getting in the way. One of the big, you know, changes over the last few years also has been leveraging internet as a transport, right?

[00:05:04] If you would have asked me 15 years ago, would you ever be in a world where you'd leverage the internet as a transport? I'd tell you you were crazy. Private links was the only way to provide reliable connectivity. Those days are long gone, right? With hyperscalers, with SaaS-based solutions, the internet is absolutely a transport. So to some degree, we had to get comfortable being uncomfortable with leveraging the internet as a transport. But then we had to layer on a level of assurance.

[00:05:29] How can we monitor those internet paths that we're now relying on so that when inevitably there is an issue, we know where the issue resides. We can either fix it ourselves or we can help, you know, whomever, our service provider or partner fix it. And retail has undergone enormous changes over the last decade. Customers now seamlessly move between online research, store visits, mobile devices, virtual consultations.

[00:05:55] Even search has changed because we go straight to an AI assistant now. So how have customer expectations evolved and what challenges has that created for retailers like yourself? Yeah, I mean, multi-channel retail has been a thing for a while and we thought we were pretty good at it, right? And then to your point, customers' wants and needs change. And really the strategy that, you know, that we've helped usher in is really that, again, that meets you where you are, right? So we understand that our customers shop differently. They want to shop differently. And we want to do that.

[00:06:24] But we don't want to sacrifice the experience when we do that, right? So when we talk about still creating those tailored experiences, we want, whether you're coming into a showroom and designing a piece with us, we want you to feel that that is no different than if you are sitting at home in your living room having that same conversation with a virtual design associate. And you moved away from traditional MPLS connectivity and adopted a more flexible architecture. And from a business perspective, what benefits did that unlock beyond just simply reducing costs?

[00:06:54] Yeah, well, I mean, that's the easy one is it reduced costs. But ancillary to that also is it gave us greater flexibility. So when we wanted to stand up a location in, say, like East Hampton, right, traditionally possibly getting a private circuit into that area would have been a little bit more difficult. It would have taken time. The business wanted to move quickly. So by us being able to leverage just commodity internet connection, that's something that we can typically get delivered very quickly, very flexibly.

[00:07:22] You know, your speeds may vary depending upon where you are in the country. But in general, you can typically get decent speed, you know, with, you know, less than sometimes seven days with private circuits. That's just not that's unheard of. Right. 90 days is a good is a good time. So it just it added a lot of flexibility for us to scale up, scale down and also just deliver service a lot quicker than we were able to before. And tech teams are often asked to do more with less while supporting growth and innovation.

[00:07:52] How was simplified network operations? How's this helped your teams focus on delivering some of those better outcomes for both employees and the customers, too? Yeah. So our infrastructure team is very efficient. We're a lean team, as I like to say. So for networking, there's three of us and we are responsible for all of the connectivity at Room and Board. So that's, you know, LAN, WAN, wireless. We have a lion's share of the security responsibility in addition to collaboration. So it's a lot for three people.

[00:08:19] So one of the things when I started with Room and Board, sort of my my operating method is we don't manage management tools. We don't have time. So we need to leverage our partners and the relationships with have those partners and leverage their management tools. So something like a Meraki or like a Cisco cloud control or like a CDFMC through Cisco cloud security. Right. Those are all management platforms that we're happy to let someone else manage. And we just manage the outcomes then.

[00:08:47] And by doing that, we spend less time on the back of house work and more time on being able to support the business on the outcomes that they're looking for and deliver our own outcomes. And visibility has also become increasingly important as organizations rely more heavily on applications and services. How is having greater insight into your network performance? How's that change the way you identify and resolve issues? It's a spider web, isn't it?

[00:09:15] Just looking at collaboration apps and like the speed at which we adopted collaboration applications within our environment, it was breakneck speed. I've never seen the business adopt any application as quickly as we adopted our collaboration tools. And that is a whole host of challenges, right? There's a ton of dependencies, some of it within our control, some of it out of our control. And to your point, how do we how do we baseline that then? Right. And how do we understand when there's disruption? One of the products that we really enjoy is Thousand Eyes.

[00:09:44] And we enjoy it specifically because it gives us that level of visibility with a combination of cloud agents. Right. Kind of looking outside in or looking across the Internet and then pairing that with enterprise applications. So we get actual, you know, real world edge metrics that we can use to SaaS based applications, looking at network underlays. You know, SD-WAN is great and SD-WAN is fantastic. But if there's a problem with the underlay that just populates upward. Right. And if you don't have visibility into that underlay, you're going to be struggling.

[00:10:12] So all of that visibility and then being able to use like endpoint agents so that we can actually live our metrics closer to the actual user experience. All of that visibility fabric that we get, that allows us to be confident when we start rolling out additional applications that we may not necessarily understand all those dependencies. We're able to start to see them through that monitoring. And this week, there's been so many big announcements. But from the conversations I've been having, Cisco Cloud Control, that is what's exciting a lot of people here.

[00:10:41] And I believe you're participating in some of the early field trials there. So tell me what attracted you to the idea of this unified platform and what problems are you hoping it will solve for your team? Yeah, so we were fortunate enough to be invited in to work on Cisco Cloud Control and we've really enjoyed it. So one of the things that I had wanted to see is it's great to see demos and it's great to see labs. But with that sterilized data, it's really hard to understand and conceptualize the benefits, right?

[00:11:10] So we actually tied our production tenants into our Cisco Cloud Control trial. And in doing that, we sort of immersed ourselves in the platform, right? We were using it for day-to-day activities. And it's a hard thing to quantify, but when you're used to bouncing between multiple management platforms, right? Whether it be, you know, Cisco Security Control or Meraki or ThousandEyes or Splunk, right? It's you get used to that feel, right? It increases.

[00:11:38] I think I heard somebody say once, like, it's an additional cognitive load, right? When you're kind of context switching between all of those platforms. Well, it really clicked for the team, I think, when we had everything in a single space, when we were able to cross, not cross launch, but cross, you know, cross domains. And it didn't feel disruptive. It didn't break that workflow. It didn't increase that cognitive load. And in the additional context we were seeing then between the environments, it really clicked that, you know, we needed this.

[00:12:06] We needed this and we wanted it and we love it. And it helps reduce that additional overhead of managing multiple platforms. And to give listeners a little peek behind the curtain of what you do here, if a customer was to walk into Room & Board store and everything is working perfectly, what technology are they benefiting from without even realizing? Sure. So you walk into one of our beautiful showrooms and the first thing is you're going to be greeted by a design associate. And they're going to ask, well, you know, how are you?

[00:12:36] What are you doing today? You know, can I help you find anything? Is there anything I can show you? And they'll walk you around the showroom and show you the product that you're interested in. And if you're interested in starting to have a conversation around design, they might walk over to an iMac and start a floor planner to start building that space with you. At the same time, they're going to have an iPad in their hand. And that iPad is their primary selling interface. So it leverages our internal application stack. It has all of the collaboration tools on it. It has their messaging on it.

[00:13:05] So that's really their one-to-one device. So they will be working both from that iPad and then also potentially one of the iMacs on the floor. And that's going to be their technology stack that they're leveraging. Now, when all of that works well, it's seamless. They don't worry about where they are. They can move between floors, up and down stairwells, right?

[00:13:24] All the things, if you think about a dense wireless urban environment like a San Francisco or a Chelsea, New York, they're big buildings, multi-story brick, concrete, lots of wireless signal, right? And they might be going up and down and all around the showroom. And as long as we're doing our job, they don't even have to think about it. All they're thinking about is being able to create the experience for the customer. They're not thinking about the technology. They're not worried about it. They're not frustrated by it, right? All those things.

[00:13:52] Again, we don't ever want to be in the way of our design associates doing what they do best. A big thank you to Denodo for helping me make more than 60 monthly interviews possible across the Tech Talks network. And as businesses move from Gen AI to Agentic AI, trusted data becomes everything.

[00:14:14] Everything from Gen AI to Agentic AI, Denodo is helping organizations build intelligent, secure and scalable AI solutions with data access, governance and explainable results. So build AI that you can trust and do it with Denodo. And you can learn more by simply visiting denodo.com.

[00:14:37] And looking to the future, there's a lot of discussion here at Cisco Live about AI agents, the future of IT operations. From your perspective, where do you see AI creating the most practical value for you over the next few years? So really what I see for our team and our technology team is really sort of what we saw this morning and yesterday in some of the demos and some of the announcements that G2 and team had made. Of really those Gen AI agents are digital coworkers for our technology team, right?

[00:15:06] I see them as additional support staff, right? So now we go from having a team of three very talented, highly skilled engineers to 300 engineers, right? So we can spin off tasks for them to work on. We can ask them to go find information. All the things that we take time, specifically if we're in like a high-pressure troubleshooting situation or onboarding. And there may be tasks that we need done that would have taken somebody time.

[00:15:29] Now we can have that information brought back to us and then make those engineering decisions, make those interpretations, and even start peeling away some of the low-level troubleshooting and resolution and start letting those agents do that work, right? Freeing us up even more to focus on those value-driven tasks that we need to be focused on.

[00:15:49] And looking further into the future, how do you see technology helping create experiences and superior experiences that still feel personal, human, and relationship-driven? Is that important to you as well? It is. And I and Room and Board value relationships. Again, we value partnerships. And I think what AI for us in technology is really going to do is, again, just continue to augment the amazing talent that we have and make us better at our job.

[00:16:17] And, you know, to date, you know, automation in general, right? You could look at it as having freed up. If you're going to do the same thing twice, you should probably automate it. And what does that do? It frees you up to do other things. So I look at AI in a very similar fashion of, you know, on steroids, automation, that we're going to free ourselves up to be able to focus on the harder problems, right? And the more value-driven problems and less on, you know, some of the day-to-day or more time-consuming tasks.

[00:16:45] And on a personal level, this is not your first rodeo. I know you've come to Cisco live many times now. And when you are taking that flight home, what are you going to be taking when you finally finish all your interviews and all the conversation? You can just sit down and reflect on what you've seen. What are you going to be reflecting on that journey home? So I think one of the things that really resonated with me was probably the first day when G2 put up the slide that was a vertical integrated stack.

[00:17:12] Then it's the first time I've ever seen a Cisco technology stack shown that way, a truly integrated vertical stack. And I think it hit home for me at that point. And then when the comparison was made to the 2024 keynote that he had delivered about, you know, setting the stage, right? These are the things that we're working on. These are the things that we're going to deliver for you. Hang on. We're working on it, right? And this year, to me, it was kind of the fulfillment of that promise, right? Of like, hey, we've done a lot of work. We've done our homework. We've listened.

[00:17:42] You know, we appreciate that they've listened. We appreciate that partnership immensely. And they delivered. And I don't know how anybody could be disappointed by that. It was amazing. And it's going to take a long time to digest. And that'll be on the flight home along with a nap. Awesome. Well, I will include links to your LinkedIn. Anywhere else you would like me to point? Listeners who wanted to find out more about Room and Board and the journey that you've been on? Yep. I'm available on LinkedIn. Like you said, that's probably the best way to reach me if you have questions.

[00:18:11] And I'm more than happy to answer any questions or help anybody along the way. Awesome. Well, I think we'll have to put a date in the diary to speak again next year at the same time. See how you've got on with Cisco Cloud Control. I think there'll be a lot of big stories out of that. But thank you for stopping by today. Really appreciate it, Tom. Thank you. What I loved about this conversation is how often we came back to people. Yeah, it's easy to get caught up talking about networks, cloud platform security, and AI at a tech conference.

[00:18:39] But at Room and Board, technology has a very clear purpose. And that's to help create better experiences for customers and give associates the tools they need to focus on relationships rather than technical challenges. And I love Mark's description of the technology as the grease in the wheels. When everything is working properly, customers don't think about wireless networks, collaboration platforms, or application performance.

[00:19:10] Because they're simply enjoying the seamless experience, whether they're standing in a showroom or connecting remotely with a designer located hundreds of miles away. So maybe the biggest takeaway from our discussion was that AI isn't replacing people. Instead, it's creating opportunities for smaller teams to accomplish more, reduce repetitive work, and spend more time focusing on challenges that genuinely benefit from human creativity and expertise.

[00:19:39] But over to you. What's the best example of technology improving customer experience that you've seen and doing so without making itself the centre of attention? TechTalksNetwork.com. Let me know your thoughts as always, and I'll return again tomorrow with another guest. Thanks for listening as always. Bye for now. Bye for now. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.