Retail Technology Show 2025 talking point: do physical stores need special treatment in a multi-channel world?

No. Stores don’t need special treatment, said Paul Sims, ex-Chief Architect at M&S and a former technologist at Halford, Travis Perkins and many other UK brands, while speaking at Retail Technology Show 2025 in London this week. They need integration. 

“You should treat all your customers the same,” said Sims, speaking exclusively to RTIH after his presentation in the Future of Trading conference stream at RTS 2025, held on 2nd April in London’s Docklands at the ExCel venue, where thousands of practitioners gathered.

“It’s a nonsense to talk about omnichannel today. It’s a multi-channel environment,” said Sims. He went on to discuss the pros and cons of each channel. But his essential point was to forget offline because such a thing doesn’t exist anymore in physical stores - if you’ve properly aligned your data, tracking, services and operations that is."

“Stores can help your NPS customer satisfaction score and online does occasionally go down. But connectivity at the Point of Sale (PoS) can also be an issue,” said Sims, as he debated the pros and cons of each channel - and how integrating them so the best of both of available to customer in a universal way was the key to future success anyway.  

“Think customer! Stop thinking about technology - your customer doesn’t care,” advised Sims to those gathered at the Magnificent Stage at RTS 2025. It is the service that matters and it is retailers’ jobs to align all that to ensure a good customer experience (CX), with appropriate efficiency, data and ease-of-use.    

Offline thinking is irrelevant

“There is the tendency for retailers to refer to their physical stores as the offline environment,” said Sims, while arguing against this false narrative. “Digital customers are lovely as they leave data trials behind goes the story. Whereas, in reality, they are just different.”

“Some think in-store customers are a nightmare, riffling through racks of clothing and making them messy, while wearing headphones and looking at their phone, so you cannot even engage them with a friendly ‘Hi can I help?’ opening greeting.” 

However, you can engage in-store customers - and get to them on their smartphones - if your systems, operations and offering is correctly aligned. Integration is required and maximising the strengths of each customer-facing point.    

A mindset change needs to happen within the industry to forget about on or offline – it’s irrelevant argued Sims. His viewpoint is certainly gathering pace among the attendees at RTS but they do tend towards the technologists in the sector, so he is perhaps pushing at an open door there.

Sims concluded by referring to the classic British sitcom Open All Hours, where the main shopkeeper character of Arkwright was always open and always knew all his customers and what they wanted in his small cornershop, mom and pop style hardware store. “You can do that for larger stores with technology now,” he said, while urging attendees to truly and deeply know their customers.

“Offline isn’t a thing anymore,” said Sims. But good customer service and efficient systems are - they always are. It is just a multi-channel environment now.