Retailers: What Do We Mean by Marrying Physical and Digital Channels?

I’ve already admitted in a previous blog that I’m addicted to home improvement shows. Now I’ll admit I’m also addicted to cooking shows! Saturday I was watching one, and the host mentioned letting the ingredients marry for a while. She explained that letting them sit helps them meld together to create an even tastier bite.

That’s what we mean when we say retailers should marry their physical and digital channels. If you attended NRF 2025 and visited the Verint booth, you may have heard us talk about it.

Essentially, by capturing customer behavior insights on a single platform, both from in-store (physical) and digital channels, you create a more holistic, actionable picture of the entire customer journey. These insights help you create that satisfying and tasty dish of a seamless customer journey. (Okay, I agree. I took the metaphor too far there. 😉)

Let me explain in more detail.

Capturing CX Insights from Your Physical Channel–Your Stores

Stores have long been a “black hole” when it comes to customer insights. You might have solutions that give your foot traffic counts, and register sales, and even customer service desk inquiries.

But how do you capture information on customers who walk in and walk out without a sale? What did they come into your stores to do? Why did they leave? Did they interact with a store associate and if yes, how did that interaction go?

Today there are solutions that can help you capture customer intent, sentiment and feedback on the store experience. Here are a few examples.

Digital appointment booking enables customers to schedule in-person, online or video appointments through the channel of their choice, at a day and time that’s convenient for them. By customizing the questions during the scheduling process, you can capture a host of insights that enable you to better understand customer needs and offer a more personalized experience.

A queue management solution enables walk-in customers to easily join a virtual queue through your store host/greeter, a free-standing kiosk or a QR code posted at the entrance to the store or department. Customers benefit from real-time notifications on wait time and position in line, allowing them to browse instead of standing in a line.

Like appointment booking, you can customize the questions asked when joining a line about customer intent or interests. Not only do you understand what customers are looking for, but you can better match them to store associates with the knowledge needed to properly serve each customer.

Now many retailers have point solutions for appointment booking or queue management. Unfortunately, point solutions typically require add-on services to customize the interface and questions you ask your customers during the process.

They also often require services to create integrations to unlock that valuable customer data trapped in the tool.  When these solutions are part of a larger CX automation platform, the interfaces and data collected can easily be accessed for analysis and insights into the customer journey.

And with a single CX automation platform, you can automatically trigger a request for store visit feedback that involved an appointment or queue with a web, email, or text/mobile customer feedback survey.  These solutions start to fill that black hole of in-store customer experience data.

Passive and Active Capturing of CX Insights Across Your Voice and Digital Channels

You can continually and passively collect CX and interaction data through your digital (chat, text and social) and voice channels with speech and text analytics solutions.  For example:

Speech analytics solutions automatically discover and analyze words, phrases, categories, and themes that may be affecting customer experience in your contact center. This wealth of behavioral data can help you:

• Discover and quickly act on customer insights regarding satisfaction, business issues, competitive intelligence, and marketing campaigns
• Reduce churn by discovering root causes and predicting at-risk customers

• Enhance contact center performance with insights to reduce agent handle time and repeat calls.

Couple this with text analytics, and you can drive similar insights and results from your digital channels.

Actively capturing customer feedback requires more than just a survey tool.  To truly understand your customers, you need a robust Voice of the Customer solution and program, one that leverages a multichannel intelligent listening engine to collect direct, indirect, and inferred customer feedback. Such a program empowers CX teams to take tactical, operational and strategic actions to improve your customer experience and loyalty, increase operational efficiencies, and quickly identify areas that require improvements.

Marrying Physical and Digital Channels

Now this is the hard part for retailers unless you have a unified CX automation platform. Marrying interaction and CX data from across all channels – including the store – is extremely difficult if you have an ecosystem of diverse point solutions managed by different departments and individuals.

To take quick action should there be a CX fail at any given customer touchpoint, you need a single platform that can:

• Capture interaction, workforce performance and customer feedback data and consolidate it into a central repository
• Leverage AI and automation to analyze and uncover issues and opportunities
• Send alerts or guidance in real time to help retain an at-risk customer, resolve an issue before it becomes a systemic problem, or suggest new ways to improve CX.

Learn how Verint Platform can help retailers marry their physical and digital channels so they can get a holistic view of the customer journey and quickly identify opportunities to improve CX and build a loyal customer base.