A multi-channel experience needs to be seamless and transparent to the customer; we can all agree on that. But what about the retailer? It takes a lot of work and a lot more internal cooperation to deliver on seamless multi-channel experiences, especially for established brick-and-mortar-based retailers. All this work and “cooperation” can take a toll, and sometimes what looks seamless to the customer can come at the expense of one channel, one division, or even at the expense of some careers.

It’s clear that most retailers want to do the right thing when it comes to their customers. I have talked with many of you out there who have given examples of how store employees accept returns from the company’s online sales channel because the customer expects it. Even though the company’s infrastructure won’t support this type of transaction and the store staff has to make lots of phone calls and do other fancy footwork to deal with the return, they know that their customer sees just the one brand and they try to deliver on that seamless view.

The need to deliver on the multi-channel promise is clear; the way to re-organize a retailer’s staff and infrastructure to support the promise is not. Many of you reading this blog live with this challenge every day. In fact, if there were one right way to structure a multi-channel retail organization, and every retailer did it, many of your job-related challenges would diminish along with your daily stress level.

One clear indication of how difficult it is to organize effectively comes down to where the e-commerce team lives within the organization. Retailers put this group in Sales, in Marketing, in Merchandising, or even in IT! What other department in retail as we know it today has this kind of identity problem?

So how does a multi-channel retailer make it possible to always do the right thing by the customer and set up its organization so that doing the right thing is always the easiest thing to do? How do retailers get past the legacy systems and siloed mindsets of its divisions to ensure that everyone has a clear incentive for playing nice and realizing the potential of multi-channel retailing?

I don’t have the answers to these questions, but through this blog I hope I can start to identify how we in the e-commerce part of retail can help to shape the multi-channel retail landscape for the future. I will invite guest bloggers from the retail, analyst, and service-provider communities to give their perspectives, and I invite all of you to comment and share your experiences and your opinions, too.

We know the challenges and live with the awkwardness of being a hard-to-define part of a retail organization. But we can also help to influence change, so let’s get started!