Last week I attended two very different conferences. The first was AIM Global, where I moderated a panel on the retail track, talking about developments in mobile marketing and the role that auto-ID technologies might play bringing more of the digital experience into the store. The second was RIS News’s Cross-Channel Executive Summit, where I had the unique pleasure of moderating a live, spontaneous panel of University of Arizona students and alumni – an impromptu consumer research panel, if you will. I also presented the results of RIS News’s fifth annual survey into retailers’ cross-channel strategies.

While it took some shifting of gears on my part (from hanging with the Master Data Management people to hanging with the eCommerce and customer experience people), it’s not as hard to draw a theme across these two completely different conferences as you might think.

There were actually a lot of things in common between the content of the two conferences (focusing in on the retail track of AIM), but I want to talk about one in particular. I have been a pretty strong voice in the discussion about the future relevance of point of sale (POS). Specifically, you may have caught me saying things like, “With the exception of grocery and high-volume environments, I think stand-alone, traditional POS is dead. ” (I may, ahem, have been even blunter than that.) I am by no means ready to eat my words. I want to make that clear. But there have been some stirrings of things in our research – in RSR’s data, in RIS’s survey. In some of the anecdotal stuff I’ve been hearing. Those stirrings point to a group of retailers, early adopters in cross-channel, who seem to be coming to a conclusion that multiple platforms are going to be needed to support a strong customer experience.

In RSR’s survey on mobile, retailers who have already achieved mCommerce sales in the last year were much more likely than their peers to agree that the use-cases needed to support mobile commerce were significantly different from those that support eCommerce. Contrast that with a majority of retailers in lasy year’s eCommerce report who said they were at least exploring the idea of using their eCommerce platform from everything from POS to employee handhelds in stores, to in-store kiosks. In the RIS study, a clear majority of respondents said that long-term, multiple platforms would be needed to support the cross-channel experience, and another 21% said they thought that POS would be that platform. Only 18% said that the eCommerce platform would ultimately be that platform.

Hmm. Well, first, I got interesting feedback on those last numbers from a conference attendee who said that she thought maybe those people who said “POS ” were thinking about the future capabilities of POS vendors, because, she said, those POS vendors are all pitching the cross-channel message now, whether they have all of the pieces or not. That makes sense to me. I could definitely see that kind of thing happening in how we asked the question.

But when you combine the mobile data with the majority of survey takers from RIS who said the platform of the future won’t be a single “customer interaction platform ” but multiple platforms, it’s a little distressing. First, it makes getting one single view of the customer much more difficult. I mean, really – when retailers don’t measure the performance of different channels the same way today (eCommerce tends to focus on traffic and conversion while stores tend to focus on same-store-sales and sales per square foot), how is perpetuating that kind of divide going to help break down the channel barriers that exist in the customer experience?

At the same time, I can also see how the use cases for mobile might evolve to be significantly different than those for eCommerce. I can see how the term “co-browsing ” might come to mean something significantly different than all those attempts at getting two shoppers in two different locations to share the same web experience. Co-browsing might easily come to mean a consumer shopping in a store, assisted by their mobile phone. A traditional online site isn’t ever going to play that role.

Is it possible to have a future where contact center, POS, mobile web, in-store kiosk and in-store assisted selling are all supported by one platform? Where mobile app plays the role of specialized mobile use-cases? In other words, as a consumer, if you wanted to access mobile capabilities that enabled those specialized mobile use-cases, you’d have to download the retailer’s mobile app? An app that can be used as loyalty card/payment and storage of coupons and offers for redemption? Leaving the mobile web to be the unpersonalized greeting page for someone who is not currently a high-value (and engaged) shopper?

Frankly, that feels like a future that makes far more sense to me than one where each of those things – or even some combination of them – is supported by different platforms designed to optimize different customer experiences. This idea that a retailer might need separate platforms for each smacks of old, bad business practices, where the business side says, “I don’t care about the architecture it takes to support it, I want a (fill in the blank – mobile platform? Kiosk platform? Separate platform for assisted selling?) ”

I’m not saying that functionality should bow to architecture – I’m not saying that at all. My opening salvo in this platform debate is this:

At no other time in the evolution of retail technology is it more important to collaborate between the business and IT when it comes to designing the future customer experience. Yes, that experience must be the best that the retailer can possibly enable. But it also has to be unified across channels – that’s why we’ve been playing with terms like “omni-channel ” or “post-channel ” or “channel-less. ” Initially, retailers might do very well enabling a unified customer experience across channels, but I just cannot buy that technology has gotten that sophisticated (especially the way that retailers tend to use it) that retailers who take a multi-platform approach will be able to maintain a high level of unified experience over time, both as customers evolve, and as that experience evolves and innovates to meet those changing customer needs.

I very much welcome your feedback on this topic. You can email me directly at nbaird@rsrresearch.com or you can post a reply on our Facebook page. Just keep in mind that it may become future article fodder!