Dive Brief:
-
Omnichannel retail has evolved to include artificial intelligence and agentic agents, but stores still need to focus on customer experiences and brand loyalty in order to drive traffic, executives from Ulta, Stitch Fix and other companies said during a Wednesday panel at the CommerceNext Growth Show in New York.
-
In order to meet consumers where they are, retailers need to understand how consumers are shopping, said Kimberly Shenk, CEO of marketing technology firm Novi, during a panel covering the future of omnichannel retail. “Most consumers are shifting discovery to agents, agentic platforms, ChatGPT, Gemini,” she said, adding that as a result, brand identity has to be consistent across every touchpoint.
-
Omnichannel isn’t only about in-store and online anymore, Josh Friedman, senior vice president of e-commerce and digital at Ulta Beauty, added during the panel. “We are seeing a lot more use of our app in the store, especially by our guests, maybe by our associates,” he said. “Taking care of those experiences is important.”
Dive Insight:
Wednesday’s panel, titled “From Digital Natives to Legacy Institutions: Omnichannel’s Next Era,” explored the ways omnichannel has reshaped customer experiences for retailers.
When companies better understand how AI operates within the omnichannel shopping experience, they’re better able to position themselves for success, said Shenk.
“AI recommends products as a solution to a problem that a consumer is asking,” Shenk said. “It's not recommending a brand name.”
As a result, brands need to position themselves within the fan-out queries of large language models, or LLMs, which do their own research to answer consumer questions. “[AI] doesn't actually take the user prompt and use that verbatim. It takes a user prompt and then triggers its own set of thousands of queries.”
However, search results don’t always lead directly to shopping carts, Shenk said. “A lot of this isn't leading to a click, because then, of course, the consumer loves their Ulta beauty points in their program,” she said. “They want to go back there, and so that loyalty component is still important.”
Friedman said that Ulta has 47 million loyalty program members, and that “95% of our sales go through the loyalty program.” Connecting that customer experience to AI helped the company “develop better algorithms, generate some better content, and more content,” Friedman said. The company’s recently launched Ulta AI has created a more integrated omnichannel shopping experience, he added.
Panel moderator Jon Kosoff, chief digital officer of Boot Barn, also talked about integrating his company’s loyalty program with its online, in-store and in-app experiences. He said that 30% of Boot Barn’s orders are currently picked up in store and 40% are shipped from stores, but that across all channels, loyalty was the most durable connective tissue.
“We just relaunched our app in April,” Kosoff said, adding, “Loyalty is key to that piece, and we just relaunched our tier-based loyalty program.”
Meanwhile, Debbie Woloshin, chief marketing officer at Stitch Fix, said that technology was a means to customer engagement.
“We do have an app, and about 60% of our clients have downloaded the app and use it regularly,” Woloshin said during the panel. “But what I would say, to take a step back from a loyalty perspective, is that we're basically in the relationship business.”
She said that her company’s clients often shared “very intimate information with us,” and using technology tools in combination with human advisers was the key to helping build and maintain those relationships.
“So, for instance, when someone is pregnant, we’re sometimes the first to know,” Woloshin said, adding, “There's a lot in play beyond just sort of a rewards feature to really build and deepen the personalization.”
Part of creating a durable customer relationship also comes from creating an omnichannel experience that feels consistent across every platform, said panelist Mandeep Bhatia, senior vice president of global digital product and omnichannel innovation at Tapestry.
“Earlier, it was hard to scale that store concierge experience, that omnichannel experience, online,” Bhatia said. “Now with agentic AI, we can. We talked to hundreds of store associates and said, ‘What do the customers ask when they come to stores? How do they talk to you?’”
Bhatia said Tapestry trained its bots on those conversations in order to create an experience that was unique to the brand. “We want them to have the same experience that they have in stores, so that's how we think of the omnichannel architecture, not just from a technology perspective, but also from brand perspective,” he said.
Omnichannel is about consumers, not computers, Bhatia added.
“Don't start with technology first,” Bhatia said. “I mean, just because AI is there doesn't mean that we have to start creating those things. It has to be rooted in the understanding of customers and the understanding of associates.” He added that technology is creating an experience that’s “either painkillers, vitamins or chocolates, right? So you have to figure out how you balance that, but [that] will only come from understanding what a customer needs.”
