You may have noticed that I’ve been writing a lot about conferences the last few months. Last week I attended the last of my “spring conferences” and thankfully have about two months off before the “fall conferences” begin. But thankfully, after the long spring road, I apparently saved one of the best conferences for last.

The event was new one titled “Omni-channel Experience” and it was put on by Retail Connections. The format was perfect in that it got people talking, most especially retailers as they struggle to figure out how to become more omni-channel and how the store fits into that discussion. For my part, I spoke on the future of digital in the store. I had four main sections that I was going to cover, and I opened it up to questions after the first section – and got no farther because the questions were coming fast and furious, with other audience members jumping in to add their perspective.

I got through maybe 10 slides in a 40-slide deck. It was perfect.

Then we followed it up with afternoon workshops, where the focus was on either IT and operations, or customer experience. I wished I could clone myself. I chose the customer experience room in part because RSR has been operating on the theory (based on what retailers tell us in our surveys) that most of the work of figuring out what they want their omni-channel customer experience to be is done. Retailers are turning to the hard part of rolling up their sleeves and making it happen. And I wanted to see if this group of retailers felt that way.

The answer is, as always, it depends. I think retailers are still struggling with channel operations getting in the way of a single customer experience. A few retailers in the room had gone down the path of a single executive responsible for the customer experience, and they are starting to come to the conclusion that they’ve given it to the wrong person – they’ve given ownership to an executive from the digital side of the business, and they’re starting to feel like it should’ve gone to stores. Their thinking is that stores still own a lot more of the experience than digital, and stores are better about thinking strategically about a customer experience and customer service than digital, which tends to be much more acquisition focused (call center aside).

I once voiced the opinion that one of the two key differences between retail and other verticals may someday go away – in most other businesses, they have marketing and they have sales. In retail, they have marketing, and then they have channel operations. But if you’re going to try to be “channel-less” in how you serve your customers, how can you support that when you’re still organized by channels? Listening to the retail executives in that customer experience workshop, I have to go back to this challenge. Giving “customer experience” to an executive with store experience isn’t going to solve the problem. Someone needs to own the whole sales team, whether they design online experiences and spend their whole day in their web analytics solution trying to figure out how to tweak traffic or conversion, or whether they are a store associate who also happens to have some operations duties as well. It’s a heck of a lot harder to create a single customer experience when your sales team is bifurcated across two completely different organizations.

And alongside that, I see a future where marketing owns some resources in stores – people who are dedicated to marketing that store’s (or that district’s) local presence. Organizing events. Putting content onto local social profiles. Driving local traffic within the context of a corporate marketing group’s larger traffic and customer acquisition strategy.

Retail has to stop thinking about channels. We’ve been thinking about experiences more, and that’s great, but I see more and more retailers’ customer experience strategies running into channel constraints. And what that tells me is that while retailers may have good ideas about what they want the future retail experience to look like, they have not gone nearly far enough as they will need to in order to make that happen. Yeah, I know what I’m saying – I know how disruptive a change this is. Blowing up store operations, something retailers literally took decades if not centuries to perfect, is almost as radical an idea as just closing stores altogether. It won’t be easy. And it won’t happen overnight.

But it may be what it takes, for the retailer who truly wants to deliver an omni-channel experience.