Throughout my time at this year’s NRF Big Show, the topic I heard discussed most centered on the tech-enabled customer. Whether on a tour of NYC’s stores on Sunday, in the focused meetings with technologists on Monday, or even in the brief time I had to peruse the show floor Tuesday afternoon meeting new vendors — the uber-theme of every discussion (I think Ravi Bagal of Verizon said it best) — is that retailers are bringing a knife to a gun fight; the recession has significantly stalled customer-facing technology implementations, and most retailers are now in a rabid game of catch-up.

But what if there was a low tech solution gone overlooked? Low hanging fruit, as it were? My partner Nikki Baird and I stumbled upon such a thing last summer when we conducted research on the (seemingly simple) concept of gift cards. We bought cards from the top 100 internet retailers, and then rated the experience. What we found was, in short, rather appalling:

The gift card business continues to grow, but retailers’ offerings have not kept up with the times. Gift card offerings were often hard to find, difficult to navigate, and lacked follow-through for both the sender and the recipient. This represents an enormous missed opportunity for retailers… With the proliferation of digital gift cards’ popularity among buyers ranging in age, geographic and social backgrounds, most of today’s top 100 online retailers surprisingly miss a tremendous — and seemingly obvious — opportunity to steal away holiday and special-event market share. ”

Yet despite that dismal review, and even after buying 100 online gift cards (that’s quite a lot, mind you), I had no ideas how bad a gift card experience could really get. Recently, a pureplay eCommerce retailer opened my eyes to that reality. Indulge me for a moment, I promise to go quickly.

I attended shop.org in 2010. One of the vendors whose booth I attended took my business card, put it in a raffle, and a few weeks later sent me a very nice prize: a $200 gift certificate to Tiger Direct. I’d never bought from this retailer before, and because they are not on the top 100 list we’d purchased from earlier in the year, I thought it would be fun to see how they fared.

I went online, ordered a cordless phone, and used my gift card to pay for it. Two days later I got an email saying m order was in stock, but on hold, and that I should call in. I did. I was told we were good to go, and that my order would ship that day. Two days later, I got my on hold email again. I called, asked for a manager, he assured me we were good, and 5 days later I got my phone. End of story? Not quite.

Wrong phone. No worries, I still had money on my gift card, I would simply order the right phone, pay for it with the gift card, and use the wrong phone until the right one arrived. Right? Nope.

I had the exact same experience with the second order (receiving form emails on several occasions that my order was in stock but on hold), until I finally called in a third time. I was made to wait for 20 minutes until I got a person on the line. Once I got that person, they proceeded to tell me we were all good, except this time, I wasn’t falling for that. I again asked for a manager. What I got, instead, was one of the rudest customer service professionals any shopper has ever had dealt with. I would actually describe her as hostile.

I’ll spare you all the gritty details of how we got there, but this manager finally explained Tiger Direct’s gift card policy to me. Try and wrap your head around this: Every time a shopper tries to order something with a gift card, the retailer then must contact the purchaser of the gift card to guarantee it is not fraudulent. Even as I type, it’s taking all I can not to curse at this point. All this AFTER Tiger Direct has taken the revenue from the card purchase? I was literally stunned, and quite frankly, fed up with wasting my time. I hung up, sent an email explaining my plight to customer service, and was promised a prompt reply; 24 hours later received a form letter saying that my order was in stock, but on hold.

There’s not a technology on the Big Show floor that could have saved this retailer from itself. Instead, what this highlights is the importance of enacting customer-centric practices at a company’s core — without it, any technologies added will only expose that gap even further. So in conclusion, while a trip to the NRF show floor (or any retail store, for that matter) will expose how far behind retailers have fallen to tech-enabled customers, and while we maintain that streamlining the gift card purchase is a low-cost, low tech opportunity every retailer should be looking at, it is important to keep a watchful eye on the base tenets of your customer-centricity model; make sure that no matter which endeavors you take on in 2011, that any and all of them have the customer squarely in mind. Otherwise, those customers will most certainly use their technology to slap you around. If only I was big on using Twitter…