How Retail Brands Are Bridging In-Store and Online Customer Experience

Insights from a live panel with Jo Handley, Global Head of In Store Customer Experience and Emily Wishart, Head of Customer Connection at Astrid & Miyu.

Think about the last time you walked into a store and someone immediately understood the situation - knew what you needed before you could articulate it. That level of attentive, high-touch service is what premium retail has always been built on. The question every brand is wrestling with right now is: how do you recreate that online?

At a recent CX Collective event, I sat down with Emily and Jo - CX leaders at Astrid & Miyu, the brand on a mission to revolutionize the jewellery experience - to explore exactly that. What emerged was a candid, practical conversation about omnichannel CX, the responsible use of AI, and why the best customer experiences start with the right people in the right room.

1. The Omnichannel Paradox: High Touch, at Scale

In-store, the mechanics of a great experience are intuitive. A knowledgeable team member approaches at exactly the right moment, listens, and guides. The challenge brands face online is: How do you read the room and deliver genuine care across thousands of simultaneous digital interactions?

Emily, who oversees all customer-facing touchpoints - from online chat and email to reviews and social - describes the answer as relentless cross-functional alignment: “We work really closely as a team - the head of CRM, the head of ecommerce – all pulling in the same direction so that whatever channel a customer comes through, the experience feels cohesive and intentional.”

Jo, who leads the in-store retail journey, echoes this. The goal, she explains, is not to treat digital and physical as separate disciplines that happen to serve the same customer, but as two expressions of a single brand relationship. That shift in framing - from channel management to relationship management - is the foundation everything else is built on.

“We’re not just managing channels. We’re managing a relationship. The customer doesn’t see the joins between online and in-store. Neither should we.”

2. AI as a Multiplier, Not a Replacement

Few topics generate more anxiety in CX teams right now than AI and automation. The fear is understandable: will a drive to automate interactions hollow out the very human quality that makes the brand experience special?

Emily and Jo are clear-eyed about this tension - and deliberate in how they’re navigating it. Their view is that AI is most powerful not when it replaces humans, but when it creates the conditions for more valuable human interactions.

“We don’t necessarily want to be a brand that automates 80% of our queries, because that’s not us, and frankly, it’s not what our customers want,” Emily explains. “The sweet spot is using AI to take the weight off our team so that when a customer genuinely needs human support - someone who’s had a difficult experience, or wants help choosing a meaningful gift - we actually have the time and headspace to be fully present for them.”

This reframing matters enormously for team culture. The brands succeeding with AI adoption are the ones treating it as an operational upgrade - a tool that makes agents better at their jobs - rather than a cost-cutting exercise. When teams understand that automation handles the routine so they can focus on the moments that matter, resistance gives way to genuine buy-in.

“Get the team to see the value - understanding that AI is there to support customers, turning them around and bringing them back. That’s the shift you’re trying to make.”

3. Winning Team Buy-In: The Underrated CX Challenge

Technology transformation in CX often fails not because the technology doesn’t work, but because the people who need to champion it don’t believe in it. Getting frontline team buy-in is, in many ways, the hardest part of the journey.

Jo is candid about the pressure teams are feeling: “There’s definitely anxiety when AI automation gets introduced. People ask: what does this mean for me?” The answer the leadership team keeps coming back to is transparency and evidence. Show people, concretely, how the tools make their working day easier. Let them experience the benefit before asking them to advocate for it.

This has a downstream effect that compounds over time. When agents feel genuinely supported, their interactions with customers reflect that. Confidence is contagious. An agent who trusts their tools and feels valued by their organisation brings a quality of care to a customer conversation that no automation, however sophisticated, can replicate.

4. The Feedback Loop: Letting Customers Redesign Your Experience

Perhaps the most striking moment in the conversation comes when Jo describes a piece of customer feedback that genuinely changed how they operated. The brand had invested in customer profiling to understand who was walking through their doors and what they were looking for. This involved running focus groups with customers ranging from decade-long loyalists to first-time visitors.

One insight surprised the entire team.  Customers at a particular store said the team didn’t feel like “them.” Not unfriendly. Not unhelpful. Just… not relatable. They didn’t see themselves reflected in the people serving them, so they didn’t feel fully connected to the brand.

“That was a wake-up call,” Jo admits. “We ended up looking at who we had in those stores and making changes. It sounds simple but it’s easy to miss. Having the right people in the right place is everything.”

This is sophisticated CX thinking. It moves beyond satisfaction scores and resolution times to ask a more fundamental question: does the customer feel genuinely recognised by the brand - in the broadest, most human sense of that word? When the answer is no, the fix isn’t a faster checkout or a better FAQ page. It’s about people.

“Customers came in and felt they didn’t see themselves in the brand. That feedback changed who we put in which stores. Sometimes the best CX insight isn’t about process - it’s about people.”

5. The Experiential Differentiator

There is a through-line in everything Emily and Jo discuss: experience is the only sustainable differentiator left in retail. Price can be matched. Range can be copied. But the feeling a customer carries away from an interaction, online or in-store, is something a competitor cannot easily replicate.

“The experiential piece is something we really value,” Emily says. “We don’t want to lose sight of it. It’s within our control, and it can be a real differentiator from other brands.”

The brands getting this right in 2026 are the ones that have stopped treating digital and physical CX as separate institutes, stopped treating AI as either a silver bullet or an existential threat, and started thinking clearly about where human connection adds irreplaceable value - and building everything else around protecting that.

Final Thought

Customer experience, at its best, has always been about one thing: making someone feel genuinely seen and cared for. The channels, the tools, the technology - these are all in service of that. What Emily and Jo’s story makes clear is that achieving it at scale requires an organisation that is genuinely aligned around that goal, from leadership to frontline, from website to shop floor.

That alignment doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built through honest feedback loops, through brave conversations about team composition, through a clear-eyed approach to what automation should and shouldn’t do. The brands willing to do that work are the ones their customers will keep coming back to. Not because they have to - but because they want to.