It’s a phrase you hear within the retail industry constantly, but it’s never been more true – the customer doesn’t think in channels.
They don’t care whether their problem started on a website, moved to a chatbot, ended up in a contact centre, or needs a store colleague to fix it. They care whether the retailer knows who they are, what’s happened, and what needs to happen next.
That’s where many retail customer experience strategies still fall down.
Retailers have spent years being told that voice was on the way out, WhatsApp would replace the call centre, AI would answer the easy questions, and every interaction would eventually become part of one perfectly joined-up system. The reality is, surprise surprise, messier.
Some customers want to self-serve whilst some want reassurance from a person. Some are happy to wait, as long as they know what’s going on. Others will abandon a retailer the moment they’re asked to explain the same issue for the third time.
For Gamma strategic partner director Cassian Bramham-Law, the starting point is simple. Retailers need to make customers feel understood.
“The most important thing is that customers feel understood,” he says. “There’s nothing worse than having to repeat yourself or feeling like someone doesn’t understand what you’re trying to do.
“That’s not the preserve of voice. You can feel understood in web chat or with an AI bot. It doesn’t matter. But when you’re looking to do business with someone, you need to feel like your needs are understood.”
That’s the gap retailers are trying to close. Not just faster service, or more channels, or another layer of automation, but a service model that remembers the customer’s context.
A shopper might research a TV online, ask a chatbot a question, check stock, visit a store, call customer service, get delivery updates by text, then return or exchange the product through another route.
To the retailer, those may be different systems. To the customer, it’s one purchase. And frustration on the customer’s part starts when the retailer can’t see it that way.
Bramham-Law says many retailers already have the technology to join parts of that experience, especially across voice, email and chat in the contact centre. The bigger issue is whether they’re using the data properly.
“If you’re approaching an automation strategy and don’t know where to start, the simple question is: why do your customers contact you?” he says.
“Go away and look at why customers are getting in touch. You’ll probably find some of it is something really easy. Brilliant, you can automate that. Then you can take the more complex reasons for contact and map them across the entire journey.”
Start with the problem, not the platform
Customer experience conversations often start with technology: AI, chatbots, omnichannel, personalisation, automation and contact centre platforms.
Gamma customer advocate Harriet Carr says retailers are usually trying to solve something more basic.
“It’s about how we make the customer experience easier, how we take pressure off the contact centre, and how we improve the agent experience so they’re freed up to deliver a better customer experience,” she says.
That connection between customer and agent experience is hugely important. When a delivery fails, a promotion goes wrong, stock information is incorrect or a returns process breaks, the contact centre often becomes the place where every upstream problem lands.
Carr describes contact centres as “complaint centres” because they usually only get involved once something has already gone wrong.
“If the tools are right and it’s a happy path, there’s nothing going into the contact centre because the customer is in control of that delivery,” she says.
“If something goes wrong, but the investment up front has been put in the right place, the customer can see it’s been delayed by 24 hours. That’s fine, they’ll wait. As long as the information through that journey is accurate, customers are generally happy.”
What Carr is saying is that customers don’t always need speed. Often, they need certainty. A late parcel is annoying. A late parcel with no update, no clear next step and no easy way to speak to someone is worse.
Carr says retailers need to think about the value and emotional weight of each purchase. A shopper buying a cheap everyday item probably wants the quickest possible route. Someone buying a £400 pair of limited-edition trainers may want tracking, reassurance and the option to speak to a person if something looks wrong.
The same tool can’t carry the same emotional load in every transaction.
AI works best when it’s given a narrow job
Retailers are under pressure to show they’re doing something with AI. The risk is that they start with the technology and then go looking for a use case.
Bramham-Law says most retail conversations around AI still focus on lower-value, repeatable tasks: changing appointments, booking slots, handling returns or answering “where’s my order?” queries.
Those jobs are valuable because they remove avoidable contact without asking AI to handle sensitive, emotional or high-risk conversations.
“There are concerns around how data is handled, what happens with it and where it’s kept,” he says.
“The other concern is that you’re entrusting a process to a non-human. How do you make sure the guardrails are in place so the conversation stays within the boundaries it should?”
That is why Carr advises retailers to keep the scope tight.
“Just pick one thing,” she says. “Don’t try to boil the ocean with it.”
The strongest business cases often come from specific operational problems.
Bramham-Law gives the example of a client with about 900 UK branches where calls were being missed because shop floor teams couldn’t always get to the phone.
Around 60 per cent of those calls were for appointment bookings. When they were missed, they diverted into the contact centre, creating about 6 million extra calls a year.
The fix wasn’t a sweeping reinvention of customer service. When a branch couldn’t answer, the customer received a text with a WhatsApp link, allowing them to self-serve, book or amend an appointment.
That’s where AI and automation tend to work best: when the retailer can name the problem, measure the cost and give the customer a faster route to the answer.
The phone call is becoming more important, not less
Retailers have heard for years that younger shoppers don’t want to speak to anyone. Carr says that’s true for some customers, but it’s not universal.
There are shoppers who will always choose self-service first. There are others who still want a person to talk them through a problem, particularly if the purchase is expensive, urgent or emotionally important.
“The digital tool and the agent tools are the same,” Carr says. “The information the customer receives is pulled from the same source of truth. Whether you hear it from the bot within 30 seconds or you wait 30 minutes on hold, you’re going to get the same piece of information. Why do we not trust it? That’s the challenge.”
Bramham-Law expects voice volumes to fall as more routine queries move to AI and digital channels. But he doesn’t believe voice will become less important.
Instead, it will be reserved for the moments that matter most.
“Voice will become the preserve of the higher-value, higher-importance conversation,” he says. “It will almost be the protected, white-glove channel rather than the go-to day-to-day channel.”
That changes the role of the contact centre agent.
If bots and self-service tools handle the easy questions, the calls that reach an advisor are likely to be harder, more emotional or more urgent. The customer may already be frustrated. The agent may be expected to solve something that several other systems couldn’t.
Carr says that puts serious pressure on teams that are too often treated as an afterthought.
“Only the really hard stuff should get through to the advisors,” she says. “But does that mean the advisor has the right tools? If we weren’t able to intercept that contact, why would the advisor know how to solve it either?”
She says contact centres can be underfunded because they don’t look as “glamorous” as front-end AI tools.
Yet they are often the place where a damaged customer relationship is either repaired or lost completely.
“If they don’t deliver a good service, it’s the whole brand reputation,” she says. “The pressure for them to understand complex business processes, on a call, with someone shouting at them, is not a job I would envy.”
Personalisation has to be useful, not showy
Retailers once treated personalisation as a premium service. Today, shoppers expect brands to remember enough about them to avoid wasting their time.
That doesn’t mean every interaction needs to feel heavily tailored. Sometimes the best experience is almost invisible: find the product, pay, leave.
Other purchases need more support. A customer buying a sofa, watch, laptop or high-value electrical item may want advice, reassurance and continuity between online research and in-store service.
Bramham-Law says the next step for retailers is linking digital behaviour with the store experience in a way that feels helpful rather than intrusive.
“That will be one of the next steps in retail,” he says. “Joining up what customers have been doing digitally and then bringing that into store and making it real for them.”
The test is whether the data improves the experience.
Does it stop the customer repeating themselves? Does it help a store colleague give better advice? Does it make a return easier? Does it help the retailer spot when a delivery update, price change or stock issue is about to become a service problem?
If not, it’s just more data.
Bramham-Law says the best customer experience is often the one shoppers barely notice. “It just happens,” he says. “You don’t think about what you’re doing. It’s just made to work. It should either be so easy you don’t need to think about it, or it should be an experience you enjoy.”
What retailers should ask before they invest
The hardest part of customer experience isn’t choosing a platform. It’s working out where the business is letting customers down.
Carr says many retailers are trying to answer the same questions: why are people calling, what’s going wrong before they call, and what are they saying about us?
The supplier may vary depending on whether the retailer works with Microsoft, Google, Amazon or another enterprise platform. The underlying questions are often the same. Bramham-Law says retailers need to resist jumping straight to where they think they should be in a year’s time.
“What’s really important is meeting customers where they are now,” he says. “What level of service do they think they’re offering? What works well, what doesn’t, and what would they like to improve?”
For one retailer, that may mean investing in AI. For another, it may mean better delivery updates, cleaner customer data, improved call routing, or giving agents a clearer view of previous interactions.
The point is not to remove people from the process, but to use people where they add the most value.
Retailers don’t need every customer to love every channel but they need customers to trust that whichever channel they choose, the retailer will understand the issue and give them a clear answer.
That’s what good customer experience now comes down to. Not dazzling shoppers with technology, but making sure they don’t have to fight the retailer to be heard.
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