A panel of speakers from brands including Sainsbury’s and George at Asda agreed that retailers need to work harder to provide shoppers with a seamless customer journey.
Fabrice Khuller, senior product owner of digital and technology at Sainsbury's, said: “The most important thing is about people – it is how do you get the right people from the right teams to work cross functionally together.
“Some other companies we are effectively competing with as retailers already work in more iterative ways and have squads that will form around a common outcome and deliver that change in the business. We need to start organising ourselves in that way.”
Rosalyn Potts, digital customer experience manager at George at Asda, agreed that the challenge is to “drive consistency across the different channels” to ensure that customers who are online are provided with the same levels of help and support as they would be when shopping in-store.
She revealed that Asda had recently created 'The Pub Club' which involves teams across the business regularly meeting in order to ensure that the people on the ground work seamlessly together.
Lucy Hirom, a consultant at digital consultancy at Practicology, added: “We often think about the physical experience as something we all understand and only a user experience designer can see what is wrong with the eCommerce experience, but a store colleague can be a great source for eCommerce feedback.”