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ArticlePoint of sale and online: one customer view
When stores and the website do not share customer data, loyalty and service suffer. Linking till purchases to accounts, sharing history and respecting consent fixes it.
A loyal customer buys from a retailer every month, sometimes online and sometimes in store. To the website, they are an occasional buyer. To the store, they are anonymous. When they try to return an online purchase at the till, staff cannot find the order. When they receive a marketing email, it recommends the coat they bought in store last week.
None of this is unusual. In many retailers the point-of-sale system and the ecommerce platform grew up separately, with separate customer records or none at all on the store side. The result is a fractured picture of the customer, and service and loyalty both suffer. Building one customer view is not a single technology purchase. It is a set of practical decisions about identification, sharing and consent.
What a single customer view makes possible
Before starting, be clear about what you want to do with a joined-up view. The strongest early use cases tend to be about service rather than marketing, because they deliver visible benefits to customers and staff immediately.
- Returning or exchanging an online purchase in any store, with the order found in seconds.
- Store staff seeing a customer’s sizes, preferences and recent purchases when they ask for help.
- Loyalty points and rewards earned and spent in any channel.
- Receipts available in the customer’s online account, whether they bought in store or online.
- Recommendations and communications that reflect everything a customer has bought, not half of it.
Each of these depends on the same foundation: knowing that the person at the till is the same person who has an online account, with their permission.
Identify customers at the till
The hardest part is identification in store, because customers at a till are in a hurry and wary of being asked for personal details. The approach must be quick, optional and clearly worth it to them.
Common methods include scanning a loyalty card or a code in the retailer’s app, entering an email address or phone number at the till, and offering a digital receipt sent to the customer’s account. Digital receipts are often the most effective, because the benefit is immediate: no paper to lose and easy returns. Some retailers also allow customers to link a payment card to their account so that future purchases with that card are recognised, which requires particular care with consent and payment security rules.
Whatever the method, train store staff to offer it naturally and explain the benefit in one sentence. A clumsy request at a busy till does more harm than good. Measure the share of store transactions linked to a known customer by store and by colleague, and share good practice between teams.
Share history across channels
Once customers are identified, their purchase history and preferences should be available wherever they deal with you. That usually means a customer record held in one place, often a customer data platform, CRM or the ERP, with both the point-of-sale system and the ecommerce platform reading from and writing to it.
Matching records is harder than it sounds. The same person may have used different email addresses, misspelt their name or shared an account with a partner. Agree simple, cautious matching rules and allow staff to merge duplicate records with the customer present. It is better to leave two records unmatched than to merge two different people and show one customer another’s purchases.
Decide carefully what store staff should see. Recent purchases, sizes and stated preferences are helpful. Full contact details and complete spending history on a shared screen may not be appropriate. Design the store view around the conversations staff actually have with customers.
Speed matters as much as content. If looking up a customer at the till takes more than a few seconds, staff will stop doing it during busy periods. Test the lookup in a real store on a Saturday, not in a quiet office, and fix any delay before rolling it out further.
Respect consent
Under UK and EU data protection law, and increasingly elsewhere, you need a lawful basis for collecting and using customer data, and customers must understand what you are doing with it. In practice, that means being clear at the moment of collection, separating service uses from marketing uses and making preferences easy to change.
Keep service and marketing consent separate
A customer who wants a digital receipt has not necessarily agreed to marketing emails. Record the two separately, and honour each across every channel.
Consent must also travel. If a customer opts out of marketing online, the store system and every marketing tool must respect that choice. Hold consent in the same central customer record and make every channel check it. Your data protection lead should be involved from the start, not asked to approve a finished design.
Building it step by step
A single customer view is built incrementally. A sensible sequence for a mid-sized retailer might run as follows.
- Agree the central customer record and the system that holds it.
- Enable cross-channel returns by making online orders searchable at the till.
- Introduce digital receipts linked to customer accounts, with clear consent capture.
- Show recent purchases and preferences to store staff in a simple view.
- Unify loyalty so points are earned and spent in any channel.
- Only then, use the combined history to personalise marketing, within agreed consent.
Each step delivers value on its own and builds trust with customers and staff before the next.
Cross-channel returns were the turning point. Once staff could find any order in seconds, they started asking customers to link their accounts, because they could see why it helped.
Retail operations director, homeware client
Getting started
Measure where you are today: the share of store transactions linked to a known customer, the number of customer records that exist in more than one system, and how long a cross-channel return takes. Pick the service use case that frustrates customers most, usually returns, and build the foundations needed to fix it. The single customer view will grow from there, one useful step at a time.
Source: Intelliversal analysis.
