What multi-site retailers should look for when modernizing the shopper experience
For a multi-site retailer, choosing a customer experience platform is about more than comparing features. The right platform should help shoppers get answers faster, help associates spend less time on repetitive coordination, and give leaders a clearer view of what is happening across locations.
Customer experience is no longer confined to the contact center or the store. It is shaped by how stores, ecommerce, fulfillment, and service teams work together when a shopper needs help.
A platform may work well for a contact center but fail to support stores. It may offer automation without preserving context during a handoff. It may provide reporting without showing where customers are waiting, repeating questions, or abandoning a journey. The best place to start is the customer experience you want to improve.
Start with a customer journey
Retailers do not need to transform every journey at once. Choose one meaningful outcome, such as finding a product, checking an order, completing a return, or picking up an online purchase to start with.
Map what happens today across the customer and employee experience. Where do customers wait? Where do they repeat information? Where do associates rely on manual work? Where does the journey move between stores, ecommerce, fulfillment, and support?
Use that journey as the test case for every platform you evaluate. It keeps the conversation focused on business impact rather than a vendor’s feature list.
Five capabilities to evaluate
1. Connected conversations
Customers experience one brand, not separate stores, websites, fulfillment, and support teams.
A platform should help move context across voice, SMS, chat, and other communication channels. When a customer moves from a web conversation to a phone call, the next employee they interact with should have enough information to help without starting from scratch.
Ask whether the platform can connect interaction history across teams and locations, not just add more channels.
2. Retail workflow support
A retail-ready platform should support the work behind common customer questions, including product availability, order status, returns, exchanges, pickup readiness, and service follow-up.
Ask vendors to show an end-to-end scenario:
A customer asks a question.
The platform identifies the request and gathers the right details.
A routine issue is resolved or advanced.
A complex issue reaches the right person with context intact.
The interaction becomes visible as a trend leaders can review.
This reveals whether the platform supports a journey or only answers an isolated question.
3. Frontline support and intelligent routing
Associates often balance shoppers in front of them with shoppers calling in with product questions and service requests. An AI platform should reduce that strain, not create another system to manage.
Look for intelligent routing, real-time guidance, transcription, summaries, and clear next steps. Evaluate whether the platform can route conversations by store, intent, skill, availability, or overflow needs while still giving central teams appropriate control.
The practical test is simple: does the platform make the associate’s next action clearer?
4. Automation with human escalation
Automation can reduce wait time and repetitive work, but not every retail interaction should be handled the same way.
Routine questions about store hours, policies, order status, or pickup readiness may be good candidates for automation. Complex returns, product discovery, high-value purchases, and sensitive service issues may require escalation to a human associate.
A strong platform should let retailers define what automation can do, gather context before a handoff, and bring a human into the loop when their judgment or empathy matters. The goal is not to automate every interaction. It is to remove effort where the pattern is clear.
5. Visibility across the network
A platform should help leaders understand both individual conversations and broader location-level patterns.
Look for insight into recurring questions, missed demand, customer sentiment, service gaps, and differences in execution across stores. The useful question is not whether a platform has analytics, but whether those analytics help someone make a better decision about staffing, routing, service quality, or the next improvement to make.
Evaluate outcomes, not just features
A feature comparison can narrow the field, but the final decision should be based on outcomes.
Consider whether the platform can improve:
Customer effort, time to resolution, and journey completion.
Associate effort, manual work, and access to information.
Conversion, retention, service cost, and peak-period coverage.
Visibility into location-level performance and recurring friction.
Then ask how the platform will prove those outcomes. Before a pilot begins, define the baseline, the primary success measure, a guardrail, and the employee measure that will show whether the change is helping the people delivering the experience.
The retail reality check: test one journey end to end
A retail CX platform should be able to support the same journey across digital channels, stores, fulfillment, and service, not just resolve the first customer question.
Once you have a shortlist, ask every vendor to demonstrate the same journey. Order and post-purchase support is a useful example:
A customer asks for an order update through a digital channel.
The interaction moves to a store or support team when needed.
Context follows the customer.
Automation handles the routine work.
A human receives the right details when escalation is required.
Leaders can see the volume, outcome, and recurring friction across locations.
Include the people who will use and manage the platform: store associates, contact center teams, retail operations, e-commerce, CX, fulfillment, and IT.
A successful evaluation should answer four questions:
Is the journey easier for the customer?
Is it easier for the employee to deliver a resolution?
Can the business measure the result?
Can the experience scale consistently across locations?
Choose the platform that can improve one journey today
A strong CX platform evaluation should end with more than a preferred vendor. It should give the organization a clear starting point: the journey to improve, the friction to address, the teams to involve, the information to connect, and the measures that define success.
That is the foundation of connected retail CX. Start with one journey, prove the outcome, and scale what works.
Dialpad helps retailers connect conversations across stores, service teams, and digital channels so they can preserve context, reduce repetitive work, support associates, and see what customers are asking across the network.
Ready to evaluate your current retail customer experience? Explore Dialpad’s retail CX guide or talk to a Dialpad Retail CX expert.